'Open' Health IT Standards

Mention standards and my eyes usually start to glaze over. However, standards can be exciting and do matter, especially to businesses, because they may have to ensure that their products interoperate with the dominant industry standards if they are to succeed. Where standards don't exist, a particular business may try to ensure the proprietary specifications they have been using to develop their own products become the industry standard that others must follow. This will give them an edge or head-start on their competitors. However, the optimum approach for both consumers and industry as a whole is for a truly collaborative and set of 'open standards' to emerge that all companies must adhere to.

The aim of 'open standards' is to have companies bring various implementations of products to market that comply with the industry standard. Consumers then benefit from this as companies compete to produce a range of standard compliant products for them differentiated by quality, price, and innovative new features.  With regards to information technology (IT) in particular, this also allows consumers to change products their using without losing data or facing significant conversion costs, thereby preventing lock-in to a particular vendor's product. Further, open standards tend to help protect against the emergence of monopolies that unfairly control the market.  Read more at http://cosihit.blogspot.com/2012/05/open-health-it-standards.html