Unlike other industries, such as international banking, which developed and implemented standards for electronic data exchange, the American health care system still has much work to do to achieve a common data framework.

Interoperability -- the enabling of communications across software and hardware of multiple vendors -- requires the creation, acceptance, and implementation of clinical data standards to ensure that data in one part of the system is available and usable across a variety of clinical settings.

This report provides a general overview of clinical data standards and highlights how different organizations are using those standards to implement interoperable software solutions. Five case studies from a spectrum of health care organizations underscore the challenges and opportunities for implementing clinical data standards today.

The complete report is available under Document Downloads below.