I paused my blog posts for the past few months to focus on the very exciting process of becoming a mother! As happy and necessary as the time off has been, I’m excited to get back to engaging a different part of my brain.

I spotted the article “Digital health is no longer the cure and it’s creating a fragmentation epidemic” by Fast Company, and I’m happy to see them calling out the very real barrier for patients of technology fragmentation. I’m sure anyone in the US that has had to manage a health condition has found that they’re juggling multiple EMRs, labs, etc. while navigating routine care vs. specialists. Beyond patient experience, this is also a barrier for things like decentralized clinical research, creating public health databases, retrospective research, and more. We’re simply unable to make good on the promise of Digital Health in this landscape.

Where the article fell short seems to be on the how. Standardization/interoperability comes from standards organizations (like ISO and IEC in the physical product world) and government regulations. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act kicked the healthcare industry in the pants to get EMRs in place, but failed to take the step to organize and require standardization. There are groups like Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) that have created an open community data standard. Where influence fails, regulation may be the answer to create the change needed to make a big step forward.

Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Electronic_medical_record.jpg