GK:

I have been witness to many non-standards-based development paths in my field that parallel your description of hospitals and private practices having countless systems that would not "talk" to each other. The early days of digital audio transport using UTP schemes is an example, whereas many manufacturers developed their own proprietary technology, and interfacing one manufacturer's products with another took a highly customized third-party solution to translate between them, if it could be done at all. Then came a company named Peak Audio that developed a technology that used the standards-based TCP/IP protocol, and now their technology, CobraNet, is licensed to everyone and has become the de facto standard for transporting high-fidelity, uncompressed digital audio in the pro audio industry.

From your post...

IMO the future will bring standardization that will render their current CDX services obsolete. Note: this is only as applies to the private health care sector--obviously state and federal government agencies are a completely different story and hold a unique potential.

From the Patriot website Technology page...

Our technology, the Crossflo DataExchange® (CDX), was developed to exchange data between a customer's application or database and an XML schema such as NIEM, Universal Core (U-CORE), CAP, GJXDM, or HL7. CDX can use any XML schema or even create a new schema specific to a customer's needs. Whether your system is a source of data, a target for data, or both, it is "mapped" to the designated XML schema, and the subsequent exchange of data follows this common schema.

We appear to agree on the public health care sector opportunities available to Crossflo in state and federal agencies, where I will assume your opinion regarding Crossflo's CDX product being rendered obsolete does not apply. I disagree with your characterization of CDX being a non-standards-based solution, as noted by the above excerpt from Patriot's website. Perhaps you meant that new health care industry-specific standards will be developed. Never-the-less, I believe CDX and it's next-generation versions could be quite applicable to the exchange of data between all private and public agencies, perhaps even part of any future standards development. But I am admittedly not a health care field expert, nor am I very familiar with the current solutions and their subtleties as they related to the needs of health care agencies ... (my limited view working with hospitals, private practices and Medicare for my parents leaves much to be desired, as frustrating as these experiences have been...LOL). The key to any penetration by HP/Crossflo would undoubtedly be the level of success they have in pursuading agencies, public or private, to see their solution as providing a benefit and therefore worth investing in.

Further on the private sector, in which I will assume your experience lies (correct?), is it, in your view, that private agencies would prefer to stay with industry-vetted solution providers that they are familiar with and not be inclined to seek solutions that might be better suited to interacting their electronic records with a larger network of agencies, such as those in the public sector? Put another way, what is your view of the current mandates addressing the sharing of electronic medical records and how private agencies are planning for what might be a larger network of agencies that includes both public and private? Would not the HP/Crossflo/Iameter services be applicable here, being solutions that adhere to standards such as those listed in the above excerpt? And could the current private sector solution being used benefit from the CDX solution when data exchange outside of that solution's capabilities are required?

What I am after is a better understanding of how the CDX data exchange technology fits into the framework of already established technologies, in particular any shortcomings of those established technologies when considered against the developments toward a time of unfettered data exchange between any health care agency, if that is even at all possible.

Thank you in advance for your response and further comments.

DG