Comment Re:Feds (Score 3, Interesting) 184
There are already industry standards for EMR
Common Document Architecture (CDA) - provides formats for the interchange of data built on the OASIS schema.
Integrating Healthcare in the Enterprise - defines profiles for implementing technologies in an interoperable manner.
Open eHealth - open source baseline implementation of the above.
That's just for clinical data. There are a whole other set of standard for financial/claims records (X12) and pharmacy records/scripts (NCPDP).
The problem is that medical data is pretty complicated and often the context of the document is as important as the content. You almost always have to massage documents coming in even if they are ostensibly formatted to a standard you consume. You have to normalize units, make sure all the fields are part of the subset of the standard your system supports, etc.
And that doesn't even begin to get into tracking patient consent, tracking identity across multiple orgs, depts, and visits (MPI,PIX/PDQ), plus access restrictions and emergency access exceptions.