Milton Chen, CEO of VSee got in some geek time with Aneesh Chopra last week to collaborate on one of Aneesh’s babies — the Argonaut Project— to make sharing electronic health records easier by using Internet open standards.
While standardizing electronic health information exchange doesn’t exactly sound like the stuff of myths and heroes, it is a monumental task, and the Argonaut Project is taking the challenge by the horns. Specifically, it aims to fast-track develop a first-generation API that will allow health professionals to share electronic health records (EHR), documents, and other health information across different systems. Their work builds upon a framework called Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, or FHIR. The HL7 standards commitee as well as several private companies and organizations— including athenahealth, Cerner, Epic, Mayo Clinic, and McKesson— are coming together to make this vision a reality.
President Obama appointed Chopra to be the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States (CTO). Chopra previously served as the state of Virginia’s Secretary of Technology and is the author of Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government (May 2014). Also, he recently started a new company called Hunch Analytics to more effectively use big data, especially in healthcare.
