Every organisation in the health care sector has a requirement to be able to work seamlessly with other organisations. This interoperability is required to support many different activities, such as claiming, reporting to various bodies for statistical purposes, reporting to a variety of health registries, referring patients to other health care providers and sharing the results of clinical tests or interventions.

Standards are the key to interoperability between businesses. It is standards that allow us to travel from one country to another and still use our automatic teller machine card in a foreign machine. The banking industry realised long ago that there is no advantage in taking proprietary approaches to information. The real advantage is gained from being able to better service customers. In order to achieve such interoperability, the banking industry had to agree on a number of common specifications including standards for cards, customer and bank identification, security and transaction messaging.

The health care sector is rapidly moving towards a similar realisation to the banking industry, with an increasing emphasis on using standards as a means of enabling clinicians to be more productive and to deliver better and safer health care outcomes. To achieve interoperability in the health care sector, a number of standards will need to be agreed upon, including standards for patient and provider identification, security, messaging, common codes for identifying medications, diagnoses and procedures, and standards for sharing electronic health records (EHR).