FHIR May Not Help Healthcare Organizations Achieve Semantic Interoperability

A recent article in HIT INFRASTRUCTURE.COM by Elizabeth O’Dowd clearly articulates the challenges facing healthcare organizations seeking semantic interoperability utilizing FHIR due to its many variations that prevent the smooth exchange of information.

According to Ms. O’Dowd, “Healthcare organizations participating in the value-based care environment are in need of strong, secure data pipelines that can help them communicate across disparate health systems to coordinate and streamline patient care. As providers build out the infrastructure required to support meaningful health information exchange, they are keeping their eyes on the ultimate goal of complete semantic interoperability: the ability to seamlessly exchange information that can be accepted, read, and understood across any system created by any health IT vendor. Using the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, now commonly known by the acronym FHIR, to build out data exchange capabilities has become a popular approach. The internet-based standard offers common ground for providers and developers who wish to move away from proprietary architecture and a “walled garden” approach to data management.”

“Large health systems, HIEs, and payers have essentially solved the challenge of transporting clinical data.  But when they tried to integrate the transported data from multiple sources, they’ve had difficulty achieving semantic levels of interoperability,” according to John D’Amore, President and Chief Strategy Officer at Diameter Health. This is due to the wide variation in the way information is collected, coded, processed and stored in a vast array of formats that each include their own quirks and rules. And all of these have the potential to interfere with data integrity and data quality.

This is where WhamTech SmartData Fabric® security-centric distributed virtual data, master data and graph data management, and analytics solutions with data discovery, comes in. SmartData Fabric® enables true patient-centric views and interoperability across multiple disparate data sources, thereby virtually bridging multiple systems regardless of where or how the data is stored. SmartData Fabric® allows for access to, and integrate, disparate data, while maintaining data security, quality, governance and standards, minimizing load on systems and supporting standard applications, such as BI/reporting and analytics.

About WhamTech
WhamTech, Inc. is a software company whose mission is to develop security-centric distributed virtual data, master data and graph data management, and analytics technology software products. WhamTech develops these products to anticipate, meet and exceed the demands of customers seeking an alternative to the conventional approaches of data warehouses, federated data access with conventional adapters and enterprise search. WhamTech’s goal is to provide an improved and more seamless way to work with data, by leaving it where it resides, and change the way fundamental and advanced data management is addressed. For more information, visit WhamTech at www.whamtech.com or follow @WhamTech_Inc on Twitter.

By: Larry King, CPA, CGMA WhamTech CFO/COO

Contact
Larry King, 972-991-5700 ext. 703
larry.king@whamtech.com