Over the centuries, mankind has been fighting diseases and looking for the universal cure. Yet here we are, still searching for the magic answer. As soon as one disease is cured, five more come up. The drug for one problem causes two more. Add to it overpopulation, and we face a not so optimistic scenario of our future.
Loads of data-rich medical records are stored in different hospitals, medical centres, private clinics, emergency rooms and set aside from fitness trackers, mobile health applications, and dental clinics. The chaos of the overloaded healthcare record system has caused a global interoperability challenge. Procrastination with the solution could come at the price of human lives.
Other industries have successfully overcome interoperability issues using smart technologies developed in the 21st century. In the financial sector, it’s the creation of independent platforms like Zelle and Venmo which aggregate information from different accounts and private financial service providers. In the IT sector, the interoperability challenges make services work together allowing data synchronization. The Open Health Information Exchange is an example of the evolved Rwanda Health Information Exchange for healthcare data sharing.
With medical advances and their interdependence on modern technologies, the need for interoperability in healthcare is skyrocketing. The vast number of healthcare initiatives and global data accessibility make people more independent in their choices, and healthcare companies tend to find new approaches to their consumers.
The Solution For This Challenge
Interoperability plays an important role in today’s medical care. Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and precision medicine are the main components of the emerging healthcare system. Population health initiatives continue their rapid growth, and consumer choice compels a lot of organizations to think differently about how they’re able to deliver care in various situations. Since these factors have a varied influence on healthcare organizations, each of them has a less than ideal amount of data compiled.
But, the big tech giants haven’t stood aside idly. The last updates by Apple Health app provide patients access to all their medical records at one time from several suppliers in the same place. Undoubtedly, if this application and others could pull data from every known medical record, our society would have reached interoperability long ago. However, technology and regulatory obstacles still block the way to significant progress and results.
The federal government has accepted the importance of interoperability and has decided to change the name of the Meaningful Use policy to Promoting Interoperability to better show its priorities including the ways of consolidating health information from different suppliers into a single source.
The Grapevine World team did not sit idly by, as they have more than 15 years of experience in standardized health data exchange, on the national and international levels, combining existing market-standards with Blockchain technology. Blockchain’s rapid development allowed us to offer an innovative solution to an age old problem, since our platform enables the connections of all medical records without storing them in a centralized system. While most other companies are focused on creating a unified database, we are going to connect easily with existing ones, leveraging legacy systems, and thus offering a superior solution.
Interoperability Is A New Life For Healthcare
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has decided to adopt interoperability with the VA Open API Pledge. Due to their collaboration with lots of private hospitals giving their consent to map their data to industry standards, the VA has been able to connect all data in the healthcare systems to integrate veterans’ health information into the VA’s larger database.
As the value of the organization’s technology needs is established, the capacity assessment for interoperability should be a top priority. To do so:
- The reconciliation of data reports and structures with industry standards.
- The presence of the API model concentrating on internal organization, and on the organizations of both your partner and the consumer.
- The increase of consumer transparency in consent and protection of the data.
There is a need to identify exactly those areas in which there are issues at the time of data exchange outside the organization. Of course, interoperability is not the final solution since it requires thoughtful consideration about how to unify the existing infrastructure of fragmented data. In this way, it can help and allow suppliers to use the data to transform the healthcare industry through improved results.
Each healthcare practice requires a customized electronic health record. The more complicated the system of healthcare is, the more varied the products need to be. To reach the optimum use, health systems should be able to send and exchange patient data easily, when- and wherever needed. This is only possible in an environment promoting interoperable healthcare technology. This key condition serves to underscore Grapevine World’s idea of a decentralized platform, allowing health data exchange, based on the “Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise” (IHE) methodology.
Moreover, carrying the protection of user privacy at heart, it’s up to a patient to decide if he/she is willing to share their medical records, and thus accept or reject data request.
The Grapevine platform enables a more enhanced workflow, decreased redundancies and ambiguity as well as seamless sharing of information among all providers, thus improving the value of care delivered. If we care enough, we can make a revolutionary change in the stale healthcare system. The solution is waiting for us to grab, and it only needs us to unite our efforts and create a new ecosystem for our common future well-being.
To support our project and learn more please visit our official website. Our ICO opens on July 6th, 2018, 10am CEST and will run until August 15th, 2018.
