Colloquia Archive
Interoperability: A Central Challenge in Medical Informatics
February 22, 2008
Abstract
The mission of biomedical informatics is to enable people to use information to improve health. To accomplish this we must be able to convert data into information, derive knowledge from that information, and act on that knowledge. Medical data originates from many sources, represented in a variety of formats and codes. Clinical information standards for data structure (e.g., HL7 and DICOM) and codes (e.g., LOINC and RxNORM) for information exchange between systems have been created but are not widely adopted in operational systems. To achieve interoperability between computer systems, particularly at a semantic level, we must marshal the data from hundreds of thousands of sources across the country into these structures using these codes and then, to create usable information, aggregate these data in various ways. In particular, data for the same patient from different sources which identify the patient differently have to be integrated. In addition, we have to develop methods for integrating and interpreting this often sparse and inconsistent information to derive knowledge. Once we know what to do, we need the data in a standardized form to combine with the knowledge to provide clinical decision support which is essential to putting that knowledge into action.
BiographyJ. Marc Overhage, MD, PhD, is President and CEO of the Indiana Health Information Exchange, Director of Medical Informatics at the Regenstrief Institute, Inc., and a professor of medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He has spent over 25 years developing and implementing scientific and clinical systems and evaluating their value. Working with Dr. Clement McDonald, one of the pioneers of medical informatics, he has created an electronic patient record (called the Indiana Network for Patient Care) containing data from many sources including laboratories, pharmacies and hospitals in central Indiana. Over the last five years, he has played a significant regional and national leadership role in advancing the policy, standards, financing and implementation of health information exchange. Dr. Overhage is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the American College of Physicians. He received the Davies Recognition Award for Excellence in Computer-Based Patient Recognition for the Regenstrief Medical Record System. Dr. Overhage received his BA, with High Honors, in Physics from Wabash College and his PhD in Biophysics and MD from Indiana University School of Medicine.
