Principles of Effective Profiling

Abstract

A major challenge for the healthcare industry is achieving interoperability among proprietary applications provided by different vendors. For example, each hospital department may use one or more applications that need to share clinical and administrative information with other applications. Each application may require multiple communication interfaces that must be modified and maintained. This approach is a difficult way to achieve interoperability. Alternatively, interoperability can be achieved through the use of standardized interfaces, which can reduce the cost of building and managing unique interfaces for each associated application. Developers can build applications that conform to the standardized interface definition, increasing the likelihood of interoperability and reducing cost. Maintenance cost is also reduced, since there are fewer unique interfaces to maintain. One obstacle to achieving usable standardized interfaces is that the base standards are often not defined at a granular enough level to support a specific use case or local requirements; therefore, the base standard must be further defined or “constrained”. The mechanism for constraining standards is called profiling.