Health Data Standardization Project Proposes “One Record Per Person” Model

When we sit around the ol’ HIT campfire and swap interoperability stories, many of us have little to do but gripe.

Is FHIR going to solve all of our interoperability problems? Definitely not right away, and who knows if it ever will? Can we get the big EMR vendors to share and share alike? They’ll try, but there’s always a catch. And so on. There’s always a major catch involved.

I don’t know if the following offers a better story than any of the others, but at least it’s new one, or at least new to me. Folks, I’m talking about the Standard Health Record, an approach to health data sharing doesn’t fall precisely any of the other buckets I’m aware of.

SHR is based at The MITRE Corporation, which also hosts virtual patient generator Synthea. Rather than paraphrase, let’s let the MITRE people behind SHR tell you what they’re trying to accomplish:

The Standard Health Record (SHR) provides a high quality, computable source of patient information by establishing a single target for health data standardization… Enabled through open source technology, the SHR is designed by, and for, its users to support communication across homes and healthcare systems.

Generalities aside, what is an SHR? According to the project website, the SHR specification will contain all information critical to patient identification, emergency care and primary care along with background on social determinants of health. In the future, the group expects the SHR to support genomics, microbiomics and precision medicine.

Before we dismiss this as another me-too project, it’s worth giving the collaborative’s rationale a look:

The fundamental problem is that today’s health IT systems contain semantically incompatible information. Because of the great variety of the data models of EMR/EHR systems, transferring information from one health IT system to another frequently results in the distortion or loss of information, blocking of critical details, or introduction of erroneous data. This is unacceptable in healthcare.

The approach of the Standard Health Record (SHR) is to standardize the health record and health data itself, rather than focusing on exchange standards.

As a less-technical person, I’m not qualified to say whether this can be done in a way that will be widely accepted, but the idea certainly seems intuitive.

In any event, no one is suggesting that the SHR will change the world overnight. The project seems to be at the beginning stages, with collaborators currently prototyping health record specifications leveraging existing medical record models. (The current SHR spec can be found here.)

Still, I’d love for this to work, because it is at least a fairly straightforward idea. Creating a single source of health data truth seems like it might work.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

1 Comment

  • Hi Anne,

    If you read their specs, think you’ll be disappointed. Their SHR doesn’t include the patient’s medical records from their providers — the content most patients and providers consider essential to improving care.

    How about doing a column like this on MedKaz? It makes avilable far more critical info than this SHR! ?

    Merle

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