Standards in health informatics

Standards are the key towards facilitating the sharing and exchange of information between departments, health agencies and health workers. They are needed for the information content, language used, database and system architectures to facilitate linkage between systems through an apparently seamless integration of highly distributed systems. This is often referred to as ‘interoperability’. Electronic medical or health records need standards, to index and to catalogue health related information for rapid retrieval and to obtain uniform clinical data for research purposes. Without standards, classification and coding systems we are unable to compare the health status, processes of health care, costs and outcomes between various treatment options, health agencies, regions or countries in a meaningful way.