A Manifesto on Interoperability in Health Care IT

I’ve just completed a seven-week road show – my second cross-country trip in a year – visiting with health care professionals trying to make the world more healthful and connected through the use of technology. And after all those meetings I can tell you unequivocally that the vast majority of health care information technology challenges in the U.S. are the result of illogical or short-sighted business choices, not the technology challenges themselves...

...After talking to dozens of emergency responders, hospital executives, doctors, nurses, military medics and entrepreneurs I’ve learned that in the majority of cases, the problem is one of business decisions gone myopic, greedy, and insufficiently future-focused.

In the health care IT world there is a perception — an incorrect one — that the key to profitability and long-term relevance is a hoarding of information, despite the open-source economy that grows exponentially each day. When companies realize that there is more money to be made in solving problems than building firewalls, health care information will flow like honey, and the cost to access vital data will drop...