Data Liberation Is The First Step Towards True Collaboration

I generally agree with this idea. It’s really hard to collaborate with someone if you’re not sharing the data about a patient. So, data liberation can be a true enabler for collaboration.

While I think most hospital CIOs will agree with this, I wonder how many act like data liberation is an important strategy for them. Is data liberation really a core value of their hospital organization? My guess is that for most of them it is not.

One major place they can start to make this part of the culture is in the procurement and contracting process. Software vendors are going to happily keep the data as closed as possible unless you require it of them in the contract stage. Once hospital systems make data liberation part of the IT systems procurement process, then we’ll finally be able to see the benefits of data liberation.

The problem we have today is that data liberation and sharing wasn’t part of the previous procurement and contracting process. My guess is that most assumed that being able to share data would be allowed, but few people looked at the fine print and realized what it would mean to them when it came to data sharing. Thus, we’re in a situation where many organizations have contractual issues which make data sharing expensive.

It will take a cycle of new contracts for this to be fixed, but even then it won’t be fixed if you’re organization doesn’t add this to their agenda. Software vendors happily provide the customer what they demand. We need more hospital organizations demanding data liberation.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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