Benefits of health data and interoperability standards

The opportunities of connecting health data sources

How lucky are we to enjoy the giant leaps forward in health care: new technologies, treatments, medicines and personalised care are saving lives where this was not imaginable some decades ago.

At the same time, health care is facing challenges with complexity levels that do not cease to soar:

as people live longer they accumulate more long-term conditions
the appearance of more complicated diseases leads to specialised treatments provided by different medical teams, making it more difficult to align and coordinate care across care teams and care settings.
rising costs risk breaking health care budgets
…

Digitalisation of health care

Digitalisation means that more and more health info is nowadays stored in electronic files. Your GP, hospital specialist, physiotherapist all keep track of the evolution of your health status using their own health ICT programme.

Mobile devices such as glucose-measuring sensors for diabetics or smart watches to check your heart rhythm support your health monitoring in between visits to your specialist.

The digital citizen

With growing consciousness that we can and must take care of our own health, fitness apps, food plans and medication schedules are populating our smartphone, increasingly focusing on prevention, wellness and lifestyle.

If we want to keep up, or accelerate the pace of health innovation, we need to make better re-use of the vast quantities of health data that are now collected electronically, and often in better-structured forms.

Each of us is becoming a kind of digital citizen, with the totality of all health and health-related information captured and stored in often separate digital silos.