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Unsexy though they may be, standards remain at the center of everything IT so it's worth noting whenever there's a major change in those affecting healthcare.
So, it seems, is the case with the venerable Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED), whose intellectual property rights were recently sold by the College of American Pathologists (CAP) to a new group based in Denmark called the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization, heretofore to be known as IHTSDO or SNOMED SDO, whichever takes your fancy.
SNOMED, as I'm sure you all remember, is one of the central planks of the promised, future interoperable health IT infrastructure, along with other standards such HE7. Without them, there's no way (proponents say) that people will be able to swap health information between each other, or that product developers will be able to profitably develop HIT systems that can talk to each other.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration admitted as much last year when it adopted SNOMED as the standard vocabulary that would be used to electronically code terms in prescription drug labels. That should allow healthcare professionals, and the computerized systems they use, to more easily share information between each other, thereby making it easier to establish such things as electronic medical records.
There's no doubting the value of moving standards development out of the hands of national bodies. You only have to look at the experience of the Geneva-based International Organization of Standardization (ISO) to see that.
Without ISO it's difficult to see how international trade could have developed so quickly over the past half-century if countries and their industries had been left to haggle between themselves over whose standards were best, or if the standards had to duke it out to settle a "de facto" status.
The IHTSDO -- whose founding members are national organizations from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Lithuania, The netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, the UK and the US -- hopes the same will be true of SNOMED and HIT.
Organization officials expect the development of this international version of SNOMED will speed up the development of eHealth, keep vendor's development costs in check, and avoid the cost of data migration to another system later, which it pegs at as much as $28 billion.
As I said, unsexy, but still very noteworthy.
By Brian Robinson, GHIT Contributing Writer
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