HIMSS 2006: Harmonization and interoperability getting more than lip service

Walking around the exhibits with my customers and fellow bloggers at HIMSS this year I found that harmonization and iteroperability were two themes that most vendors were touting. Ubiquity of networks (through wireless technologies) will allow excellent location-based awareness and medical devices will be more and more connected. Given the connected nature of hundreds, perhaps thousands of network-centric devices in our hospitals, we’ll need to make sure that data can interoperate and that it’s harmonized (semantically as well as structurally). Companies like NeoTool and InterfaceWare were providing some very nice HL7 messaging and brokering engine SDKs. Pervasive Software showed off it’s latest general-purpose ETL tool that provides HL7 connectivity as well. Check them all out, they each have the capability of transforming the way your healthcare data is managed within and around devices and other HIT systems.