Standards-Based Approach

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As mentioned earlier, it is an uphill task to get organizations to agree to and follow data standards once they have deployed an EMR of their own or from a private company. Without interoperability, data collected in one site may remain unusable by other hospitals or researchers. At present the US is going through a program of trying to coax everyone to adopt interoperability standards and is discovering just how difficult such an effort is. India can avoid such barriers if it quickly makes available a standards-compliant EMR for everyone before several independent systems gain enough dominance in the field to be able to impede standards. With a standards-based approach, data from any doctor, hospital or region can be treated as part of the same dataset without having to worry about incompatibility, or loss of meaning.