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The amount of data is also a huge challenge. The HL7 "standard" for patient data exchange is huge - thousands of potential data points with tens of thousands of
by jobu 11y ago
The amount of data is also a huge challenge. The HL7 "standard" for patient data exchange is huge - thousands of potential data points with tens of thousands of options. The IDC-10 code set allows more than 14,400 different codes. And that's just the tip of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10
The US ICD-10 Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM), for instance, has some 68,000 codes. The US also has the ICD-10 Procedure Coding System (ICD-10-PCS), a coding system that contains 76,000 codes not used by other countries
The size of some data also makes exchanging it difficult. A typical MRI image is 5-10 MB with sometimes over 1,000 images in a set, and some patients will receive multiple MRIs over the course of treatment.
Scale that to millions of people, and you have some idea what larger healthcare networks are dealing with (and why the VA system has had so much trouble).
Note that this data also has to be _perfect_. Incorrect or missing data can cause real harm to real people (and serious legal trouble for the company that fucks up).
- angersock 11y agoA lot of the HL7 stuff could be made a lot simpler if the hospitals embraced a simpler subset--instead, everybody picks and chooses features and fields, as do vendors, and then punt it off to integration work. It's dumb.
- nradov 11y agoIHE has done good work defining conformance profiles on top of the basic HL7 standards that help to improve interoperability. Adoption is growing but still not universal. http://www.ihe.net/ http://www.ihe.net/
- angersock 11y agoMixed bag with IHE. For example, IHE WCM (the waveform stuff for realtime signals) is not very good: it is overly textual for the data it represents, doesn't solve all the problems it can run into, has some weirdness with timing and how to map things into HL7, and so forth.