To the novice, the term “interoperability” means that two systems can talk.
To the expert, it means that they can understand each other. To much of our current data interchange is “meaning poor”.
To get past that problem, we need to do lots of work with ontologies, which, loosely put, are knowledge dictionaries. Most clinicians in the US have no training in ontologies and their real-world experience is limited to billing ontologies like CPT and ICD. As a result, the value of proper coding is largely lost on the average clinician in the US. ( I wonder how this issue is understood by common clinicians outside the US…)
Those of us who obsess with the future of Health IT recognize that we need to find ways to make Ontologies more productive.
At this year’s health 2.0 conference, I caught up with Dr. John Mattison of Kaiser Permanente to discuss a tremendously important contribution that they are making to the Open Source Health IT community. I have already blogged about this significant ontology development from Kaiser. So I was really pleased to be able to get these kinds of details from the horses mouth. These details include that the license will be the Apache 2.0 license.