Question

What are standards, and why is interoperability among standards so important? Explain with an example.

Answer 1

A standard is a documentation of set of rules, guidelines which are designed to be used to measure the quality, efficiency and properly utilization of information or a product. Standards result from collective work by experts in a field. Standards established by government and industry that encourages better communication among disparate systems.

Importance of interoperability :

Interoperability is a practice which helps to access, exchange, integrate and cooperatively use data across the organization without any restrictions. It is the way through which computer and software systems can connect and communicate with one another. There are three levels of interoperability.

• Foundational
• Structural
• Semantic

Consider a health-care system, all the test reports, blood reports , diagnosis reports of a patient are stored in a system . For example, the test lab updates the test reports of a patient in the system . A doctor who visited at previous, updated the diagnosis reports of the patient in the system. Now, when another doctor visits to diagnose the patient, the doctor can get all the information of that patient from the system. So, we can say that interoperability makes healthcare industry more efficient which helps the specialists to get the information quickly and in an efficient manner. Interoperability standards also ensures the protection of confidential patient data.