S&I's Doug Fridsma on NwHIN Enabling the Next Amazon, eBay or Facebook

Consider NwHIN to be the building blocks for what may become the World Wide Web of healthcare information – on top of which may one day be the next Amazon, eBay or Facebook, only with a health slant.

“If you take that same thinking about having standards for exchanging information and moving it around securely, we’d like NwHIN to be that portfolio,” for healthcare data, said Doug Fridsma, MD, PhD and director of the office of Standards & Interoperability in an interview at HIMSS12.

In other words, NwHIN protocols like Direct and Exchange are akin to http and https – the idea being for S&I to provide simple, modular standards that are testable, on which healthcare organizations and vendors will build new health-centric applications and services...