Growing open standards pressure on healthcare

The chorus for open standards in healthcare computing just keeps growing.

The latest move is that of Dossia, an alliance of health care technologists mainly on the consumer or medical office side of things, to join Continua, a separate consortium which includes many hospital computing vendors.

As IBM noted recently, such moves can be excuses for inaction. There is, potentially, an enormous amount of value destruction involved in a move to open standards. Proprietary systems can demand top dollar.

But customers of all sorts -- from hospitals to consumers to government -- are now demanding substantive, real change.

The devil here is in the details, but we do have the ingredients of an agreement, in the form of Internet standards, XML technologies, and such industry-specific things as HL7.

Publication of and adherence to those standards would naturally encourage more open source projects and consortia. Having a firm standard to write to means such groups need not hit a moving target.

Regardless of which party wins the coming election it's also clear there are billions of dollars at stake. Both parties are pinning their reform hopes on automated systems.

But, again, the devil is in the details and there remains plenty of time for more deviltry.