HealthContentAdvisors

dCard: An Open Standard; A Needed Standard

• Posted March 7th 2008
• by Russell

A consortium of nine healthcare technology companies and healthcare providers has unveiled a new standard for collecting, presenting and exchanging healthcare provider data. The new standard is called “dCard,” short for Doctor Card. It’s an important and needed initiative to be sure given the many tortured attempts over the years to organize basic provider information and keep it current.

We’ve spent many years in the area of claims data, thinking that the actual information used to cut checks to providers would be the key to building dependable provider databases. Not even close. It’s the same issue that has bedeviled the people behind the various physician identifiers that have been created: physicians tend to have multiple affiliations and even more addresses and phone numbers. They often have third parties involved in receiving payments. At any given time, many are not actively practicing medicine for various reasons. In short, it’s a case of volatility meets complexity.

This ongoing problem of getting control of even information this basic smacks right into two huge trends in healthcare: consumerism and improving care, while reducing the cost of care, through improved use of information technology.

How do you, for example, confidently rate the quality of a physician when you can’t even confidently supply that physician’s address and phone number?  How do you as an IT company develop an electronic health record when nobody can even organize and account for the people who will be entering data into your systems?

We wish dCard the best – we would all benefit from it success. And perhaps the standards that ultimately get traction will be based on open standards driven by voluntary consortiums – it almost has to, because other approaches haven’t advanced the ball very far.