Promoting national and international standards to build interoperable clinical applications

During the last decade, software supporting healthcare delivery has proliferated. This software can be divided into electronic medical record (EHR) systems and applications that treat EHRs as platforms. These collect, manage, and interpret medical data, thereby adding value to associated EHRs. To reduce the burden of developing for multiple EHR platforms, a group of standards has evolved that allow software written for one vendor's EHR to be introduced into settings supported by other vendors. The Health Services Platform Consortium (HSPC) is a collaborative effort to advocate for standards that will make healthcare applications truly interoperable. In this document, we discuss the approach adopted by the consortium and the standards central to this approach. We discriminate between interoperability standards that support the plug-and-play transfer of applications from one vendor's EHR to another and knowledge portability standards that allow knowledge artifacts used in one software environment to be introduced effectively in others.