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November/December 2005 Newsletter
From the Executive Director
Happy Holidays!
Like many of you I use this time of year to reflect on the achievements and challenges of the past year and plan the year ahead. 2005 has, without a doubt, been an incredible year, but by the look of things only a preparation for what lies ahead. In 1994 in a presentation I made to the National Directories Publishers Conference in Philadelphia I stated that “The value of information is directly proportional to its accuracy, relevance and ease of use”. Eleven years later I am still working the problem so personally I do not expect a quick fix but I do see some remarkable changes taking place. The sheer muscle of technology has solved many intractable data problems and, with ever increasing processing speed and ever decreasing data storage costs, we now have access to more data than ever before; accuracy, relevance and ease of use apparently still eludes us.
To a large degree the quantum leaps in data quantity are being undermined by data quality issues. The ability to accurately map data elements is the Achilles heel of all data integration projects and the ever increasing exchange of data raises issues of the authoritative source of the data itself. I have been using the phrase “Data Echo” to refer to situations where you receive back copies of your own data intermingled (integrated) with new data. Simply removing these echoes would greatly improve the quality of data just as removing echoes improves the quality of sound. In order to solve the data quality problem we are going to need to develop metrics that allow us to easily quantify data quality, and catalog data is as good a place to start as any, so this is the task we have set ourselves with ISO 8000.
One major event we are looking forward to in 2006 is the 6th International Cataloging Conference that we will be organizing in Hershey, Pennsylvania on Wednesday, October 25th and Thursday, October 26th at the Hershey Hotel. The conference will be held simultaneously with the 50th ISO TC184 SC4 meeting where experts from around the world gather to work on the ISO standards for the exchange of product model data (STEP). This committee is working on ISO 22745, a new standard for Open Technical Dictionaries such as the eOTD and on ISO 8000 the new standard for catalog data quality. You will be able to register for the conference on-line early in January and there will be opportunity for 20 exhibitors to participate in the conference. We will be combining our traditional Tuesday night speaker dinner with the ISO 50th award dinner. This promises to be a great evening. Seeing that the conference is being held in Hershey we also thought that on Wednesday evening you would enjoy dinner followed by a vintage chocolate tasting seminar organized courtesy of the Guittard Chocolate Company. It looks like this will be a very exciting conference and if you wish to present material related to implementing the eOTD please contact me so I can include you in the program.
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Benson
Executive Director, ECCMA
ECCMA Gladly Announces
We are glad to be able to announce that Dan King has been appointed to the ECCMA Board of Directors as the ECCMA Chief Operating Officer. Dan is primarily responsible for the day to day operation of ECCMA India and for ensuring the quality of the eOTD. Dan joined ECCMA in 2000 as the Technical Secretariat responsible for applying the ECCMA Code Management Procedures developed to ensure that the UNSPSC was managed in an open and fair environment. Dan has developed a unique expertise in the development and management of standards and has played a key role in the design and development of the eOTD. I am sure all ECCMA members will join us in congratulating Dan on his recent appointment.
Standards in Healthcare
Bern Werner, BCI Data
The healthcare industry is slowly transitioning from paper-based systems and a multitude of practice-specific, soloed applications to more digitized, integrated, enterprise systems. There are many similarities between healthcare’s early-stage transition to make the best use of information technology and the one that occurred more than a decade ago in the manufacturing world as it began to digitize the supply chain. The healthcare industry would benefit from the lessons learned by the manufacturing world, especially with regard to standards.
Consider the following statement from the recent HHS (Health & Human Services) press release announcing the formation of the American Health Information Community:
“Interoperability of health information is a shared goal among health care payers, providers, vendors and consumers. Myriad competitive interests have prevented a unified effort to achieve common standards and interoperability. As a result, health care has lagged behind other industries -- like the banking, transportation, and retail trade -- in realizing the benefits of modern information technology (IT).”
The attempt to achieve consensus on standardization of processes, interfaces, and terminology may seem like a Herculean task when so many organizations already have their own, different ways of doing business. But standardization can and must be achieved if the healthcare industry is to be successful in managing its costs and providing better and more efficient care to its patients. Successful efforts have been made to electronically and remotely track items through the production and distribution life cycle. We are getting closer to the day when a consumer buys a bag of corn chips in Pittsburgh, completely unaware of the chain reaction they have started (involving RFID, Real Time Location Systems, etc.) that ends with a machine in Des Moines adding three more ears of corn to the production cycle the same day.
However, the successes have not come without a considerable amount of pain. Many organizations spent millions of dollars on technology before they understood how the technology would improve their processes. Others chose solutions provided by their legacy partners and fell behind the technology curve. A common problem that almost everyone faced was the issue of sharing information across a variety of systems. Early attempts to complete electronic transactions brought to light the critical importance of data quality and the use of standards, both internally and externally. As the manufacturing industry quickly learned, you can have all the best technology in place, but if standards – backed by quality control processes – are not in place, they only realize small improvements.
The healthcare industry may be in a good position to take advantage of the lessons learned by manufacturers. As hospitals begin to implement digital clinical documentation systems, they can make use of technologies already tested by a technologically maturing supply chain to create an infrastructure for more efficient communication. In addition, a number of standards for disease names (ICD), clinical and medical terms and concepts (SNOMED), procedures (CPT4), messaging (DICOM, NCPDP, HL7, IEEE), and interoperability (HL7 CCOW) already exist. Unfortunately, not all of the standards are open, and most hospitals developed their own systems and methods of using these standards.
In many areas of healthcare, what is missing is an accessible, open and democratic process for achieving consensus on standards, managed by a controlling body. Those controlling bodies that are emerging in the healthcare industry would benefit from the ECCMA model, which is based on effective use of the Delphi Method. ECCMA uses the Internet to harness global expertise in the development and maintenance of its open system of commodity identification and definitions (eOTD), which is becoming and ISO standard.
An airplane manufacturer once asked me if the data quality/description standardization software we were selling would identify the correct part or substitute item 100% of the time. As he stated, ‘when we get the wrong bolt, planes fall out of the sky. Not good for business.’ The same goes for the healthcare industry. Replace ‘bolt’ with medication, medical history information, allergy information, etc. and the result can be just as devastating.
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