Fridsma: Healthcare Communication Is Not One-Size-Fits-All

Doug Fridsma, Director of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT's Office of Standards & Interoperability, says he doesn't believe one-size-fits-all when it comes to healthcare communications efforts. Instead, just like in daily life, comfort is what's most important to each user...

Fridsma talked at length about the Nationwide Health Information Network and what changes he foresees for the near future. He called NwHIN a "portfolio of standards, services and policies," and said that building blocks--necessary components within that portfolio--ultimately would be the key to solving actual physician problems.

"For example, one of the building blocks is this Laboratory Results Interface [the LRI project]," he said. "What we're doing is we're taking our standardized vocabularies--like LOINC [logical observation identifiers names and codes]--and our building blocks around the structure, and Direct, and assembling those together to solve the problem of making sure that a laboratory result is available to a primary care doctor wherever they are."...