Giant firms plan health data warehouse

I read this story on the journal last week. Sounds good on the surface but how are you going to force a hospital to share its data when its running a closed EMR product such as Cerner or EPIC? My experience has been that the hospitals do want to have their systems integrated and share data amongst systems but that the vendors either don't allow it, say it can't be done, or offer no assistance in getting it done. Cerner talsk a good game about their CCOE program and ability to develop applicatiosn and sharng of data. But the resp say it can't be done and of the 4 consulting firms I dealt with none were able to deliver. Philips has been one of the few that recognizes itself as a niche player and while early on in their efforts to integrate are willing to help out those eager to interface systems. Go after the EMR vendors and force them to share data in a standard way and format.

While giving due consideration to those who doubted the Wright Brothers, suffice it to say that this is a really tall order, certainly taller than Paul Bunyan standing on Babe’s shoulders! Our first challenge here is to connect together tens of thousands of facilities, of which less than 10% actually have an EMR today. Yep, the Internet will provide the highway, but I’m concerned about all those on and off ramps! Next, the HITSP folks need to move us past the challenge of data standards, and this is not the time to request any new standard entries! Once we’ve aggregated all this data, just how BIG will this repository become? Are we talking about petabytes, exabytes, or maybe zettabytes? I'm kind of in favor of trilobites, you know those cute little invertebrate fossils! Lastly, on my short-list of concerns is that Microsoft, certainly the most hacked software company in the world, will keep my healthcare data private…all for just $4.5M! If man was meant to share healthcare data…well, you get the idea!

Sharing medical/health information is a great great idea. But my first action is to do a datamining on the data to see if there is any patient has been mistreated. I expected there will be hospitals closed due the data "sharing"... You get the idea.