Interoperability of health records is certainly the buzz these days. Although there are a number of consortiums, including EHR vendors and provider organizations, diligently trying to solve this problem, there are few implemented models that achieve the goal pragmatically. And although there are barriers to interoperability that include security, network, and policy issues, the fundamental challenge is having an adequate reference implementation model for all healthcare organizations to follow. At least on the technical level there is some hope. A tool invented by Dr. Dave Carlson, and jointly developed by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs and IBM called Model Driven Health Tools (MDHT) represent that hope. It is apparent that not all organizations adhere to standards in the same way. There are several versions or interpretations of HL7, CCD, CCDA, and other standards, which does not portend interoperability in reality. What MDHT provides is a model driven approach to standard mapping for clinically useful applications and orchestration of data. What that means is that interpretations of standards like FHIR can be modeled in a uniform way so that the output is essentially a template that all developers can utilize. This reduces the variability of the interpretation and provides a more efficient tooling for subsequent applications that can consume and generate standards based data. Thus, MDHT provides an effective and uniform tool to ensure that current applications can be modified to adhere to known and accepted standards, as well as provide smarter tooling for new applications that are incorporated into the larger health IT ecosystems.
