When it comes to doing business internationally, global companies can only be successful when employees and teams effectively speak different languages and understand the cultural differences in various regions around the globe.

Likewise, if you want to move healthcare data universally between systems, todays organizations need the right translator to make this possible. While this is not a problem of language per se, the issue is with systems not being able to effectively talk to each other.

At a very basic level, these systems often dont speak the same basic interfaces and protocols. With the growing demand for clinical dataand the growing number of data sourcesall of these systems need to communicate with each other if we want to use the data at clinical decision points.

What does it take to make sure that distinct systems, devices, facilities and health communities can talk to each other? While, there are a number of reasons for the language barriers, the most significant reason is that a diverse set of standards for the transfer of clinical data that have emerged over the years to address local needs, but no one standard addresses the global needs.

Different standards, different languages

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For example, Health Level-7 or HL7 Version 2, is commonly used for sharing information about patients events in specific care settings, such as a patient being admitted, discharged, or moved to a different treatment area in a hospital. Conversely, document-based exchange standards, like the profiles in Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), focus on exchanging the information for an episode of care, or a whole longitudinal record across organizations.

From a telemedicine perspective, there are different needs, and therefore different standards. The rise of common wireless networks has allowed many medical devices to be used for tracking patient care in their homes, and health providers need to be able to gather this vital information.

For example, in a chronic-care situation, a doctor could accurately and remotely track a patients weight, being alerted of signs of fluid retention and larger problems. This actionable data needs to get to doctors quickly, but it requires the ability to speak the right language.

The tidal wave of big data grows

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All of these languages came about from different health information exchange scenarioswith the coming tidal wave of big data only making the problem bigger and bigger. Currently, effective communication between inpatient and ambulatory systems can be challenging. The problem grows exponentially when trying to include post-acute care facilities, home health, mobile and telemedicine just to name a few.

What is happening in some health systems is analogous to the mass tangle of wires that sometimes build up behind our home entertainment centers when we add on successive audio or video components such as DVD playerseach new connection increased the mess and made further growth more difficult. These tangled connection barriers have created a perfect storm for all parties involved in the healthcare ecosystem who are diligently trying to improve patient care, reduce hospital readmissions, manage costs, and develop new treatments.

You want to understand each conversation, but employing a translator to speak the dialect is costly and messy. What is needed is a one-stop-shop that can address any communications barrier from these multiple standards and connections.

With Bluetooth and Wi-Fi our home entertainment systems can now be streamlined, organized and have many sourcescan the same be said of health information technology?

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The health bus comes to town

There was a time when we shared digital information through good old-fashioned floppy disks, which started us on a path for ubiquitous data transfer. From there, came Universal Serial Bus (USB) drives, and ultimately, cloud-based applications such as Dropbox for sending, sharing, and receiving data.

In the healthcare sector, theres now a new wave of cloud-based applications that can serve as the next-generation universal bus for breaking down these language barriers through seamless clinical information exchange. These software-as-a-service programs can fully mitigate some of the biggest challenges of sharing electronic health recordsdata access and interoperability (aka untangling the mass of wires).

These offerings leverage both existing and emerging standards to move clinical data in and out of any system that connects to the bus. Every meaningful use certified electronic health record can plug into such a bus. Do multiple records systems need to speak to a single patient portal? No problem. Does an analytics tool need to access records across electronic health records systems in different sites across communities? Again, no problem.

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This ability to speak with every system allows for the easy sharing of clinical data with other hospitals, urgent and post-acute care systems, and ambulatory practices. Furthermore, these applications achieve this without expensive point-to-point connections, but by leveraging a cloud-based bus that speaks the entire suite of standards-based protocols, including HL7 V2, REST, FHIR, XDR, XDS, XCA, NwHIN, and Direct Secure Messaging.

Since these applications do not require constantly adding localized software (i.e., an individual translator), its much easier to obtain and maintain bus-level security accreditation and trust networks. Some of these include regulations in the HIPAA Security Rule and the HITECH act, industry accreditation such as HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF), and Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC,) as well as trust networks like DirectTrust.org and the eHealth Exchange. For example, some states are already transferring clinical summaries of nearly all statewide hospital discharges, by leveraging these trust network solutions.

A multi-lingual health arena

Learning a new language can be incredibly difficult and painfulfrom the vocabulary to verb conjugations to the foot-in-the-mouth speaking missteps. Fortunately, in the health information technology arena, there is now a way to speak multiple languages that makes patient data transport challenges a thing of the past.

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Buff Colchagoff has over 16 years of health information technology experience with large projects, including building the VAs PHR MyHealtheVet, as operations manager for the Nationwide Health Information Exchange (NwHIN) which grew into the Sequoia Project, the Direct Project, and now as CEO of cloud-based health messaging and exchange platform RosettaHealth.

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