health

Listen to the interview with Keith on Federal News Radio. Transformation is a challenging process, sometimes painful. Healthcare transformation seems to be one of the most challenging, and painful for the workforce likely due to the many stakeholders, complexity of information, need for trust and privacy and so on. Indications that the industry is moving up the curve from high cost/low productivity solutions toward low cost, highly effective solutions that bring real gains in productivity, accuracy and enable the goals of delivering better healthcare and health are starting to appear.

In one of my previous posts, I referenced the Standards and Interoperability (S&I) Framework, which enables healthcare stakeholders to create standards, specifications, and implementation guidelines that facilitate effective healthcare information exchange. This will facilitate the adoption of interoperable standards.

Remember when businesses all kept their own ledgers, which required updates as each new business transaction occurred? How about the added expenses that had to be paid to intermediaries adding margin for services?  And what about the inefficiencies as each business in the network (supplier, buyer, seller) all recorded the same transactions in their individual ledgers? While many businesses and industries, including healthcare, still operate this way, an emerging technology has great potential to advance Healthcare IT across the economy and in the government, namely “Blockchain.”