How Synaptic are your solutions & apps?
Posted by: SynapticHealth in SynapticServices, SynapticQuotient, strategy, mass collaboration on
Sep 29, 2009
There are a couple key challenges with healthcare information exchange (HIE) or interoperability:
- Healthcare is a distributed network of disparate systems - so healthcare information technology (HCIT) apps need to co-exist in the ecosystem of other HCIT apps. HCIT is as good as it's ability to engage in HIE (usually).
- The building blocks of HIE - healthcare systems integration and connectivity, transaction processing, and data governance - need to be commoditized in favor of value-added services like data quality management and data processing, bundles and mash-ups, robust networks and 'rails' (like online banking), and more.
One way to demonstrate how your healthcare application, information service, or widget performs is to determine how Synaptic it is - that is, with how many other applications can it exchange data? Does your application make a network of applications smarter? Is your app a key component of any healthcare information exchange? Would an HIE sponosored by a RHIO, a hospital, a health plan, a web portal or another HCIT vendor recommend your solutions or apps as 'compatible' in an ecosystem that they sponsor?
Can you benefit from mass collaboration? Do you have developers well beyond your own shop developing information exchange capabilities in/out of your solutions/apps? Shouldn't you?
From a December 2000 BusinessWeek article: "Google pioneered a now-popular technique that counts the number of links pointing to a site as a gauge of its importance. According to the theory, every link to a site is a vote of confidence that the content matter there is useful." http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/dec2000/nf2000127_947.htm
In HCIT and HIE, every system with which your system can easily exchange data should be a "vote of confidence" that you are interoperable. Better still would be actual systems interfaces, adapters, transaction protocols, etc. As apps and solutions evolve to web services, software as a service (SaaS), integration-as a serivce (IaaS), or other reasonable and scalable healthcare information services that can be bundled or mashed-up into various HCIT and HIE ecosystems of systems, vendors and developers can publish, consume and sponsor apps and bundles in the SynapticGrid - or at least list and discuss them in the SynapticHealth Directory and Registry.
This, in turn, helps determine how Synaptic your healthcare app really is.
Perhaps we should have an actual rating system - a score. We will have awards for the most Synaptic - quantitatively Synaptic and qualitatively Synaptic. Or better yet - for the highest SynapticQuotient.
Thoughts or ideas on this topic?
