Healthcare Information Technology Research & Analysis : Coplan & Company : IT Procurement Management, Project Management, System Acquisition

The Institute of Medicine (IOM), a non-governmental organization that is part of the U.S. National Academies, published a landmark study in 2000, To Err Is Human, Building a Safer Health System. This study, particularly the statistics that 44,000 to 98,000 people die every year as a result of medical error, made patient safety and error reduction priority issues in health care.

Recommendations from this IOM report focused on leadership in government and the health care industry setting a national agenda for reducing errors in health care and improving patient safety. One key outgrowth of this study was effective use of information technology and sharing information among different systems to improve patient safety. In response to this, we have projects underway, e.g., Health Level 7 (HL7) has Medical Markup Language (MML), based on XML for information sharing.

How Did Criminal Justice Agencies Do It?

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program addressed, among other issues, control and prevention of crime and delinquency. This included a government-funded program to facilitate the exchange of information among criminal justice agencies. It was not until post-9/11 government programs that we saw widespread success. Prosecutors now routinely exchange case information between their own systems and separate systems maintained by law enforcement, the courts and public defender agencies.

A partnership of government agencies and private industries created the precursor to the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), funded by the Department of Justice (DOJ). NIEM effectively and efficiently expedites sharing critical information at key decision points throughout our nation's justice, public safety, emergency and disaster management, intelligence and homeland security enterprise. The purpose of the public/private partnership was to design develop, disseminate and support enterprise-wide information exchange standards and processes that enable jurisdictions to automate information sharing.

NIEM is not software programs, databases, networks or computer systems. NIEM is cooperation. Through the cooperation of a public/private partnership, we created NIEM and criminal justice agencies now efficiently share information more cost-effectively,improve operations and maintain information for better decision-making. We now have more timely, accurate and complete information to enhance our citizens' safety.

Where Is the Health Care Industry?

We are now in our eighth year since IOM released their ground-breaking study and we have yet to establish and implement an effective solution for sharing information. Why can't we take advantage of the lessons learned from our criminal justice community and NIEM and implement a similar solution that enhances our citizens' safety in health care?