I wonder if current attempts at EHR interoperability are a case of "the perfect is the enemy of the good". Obviously the ideal solution would be one where well-structured interoperable datasets are produced and shared. This would enable very targeted analysis of patient data, and sophisticated clinical decision support functionality. However, it seems like this is still not happening, and the convoluted nature of many HL7 standards is certainly not helping.
So I've come to think that it would actually be preferable to put most of the health data into PDF-like documents, and focus on optimizing the accessibility of the data through good full-text document search that can assemble an overview by showing document snippets (i.e., allowing to get a broad cross-document overview through document previews, rather than requiring opening each document individually).
I guess some kind of especially important data, such as information on current medication or drug intolerance should really be kept in a fully structured format to enable clinical decision support, but for a lot of other information, a light-weight system based on unstructured data combined with good information retrieval tools would already improve on the status quo quite significantly.
So I've come to think that it would actually be preferable to put most of the health data into PDF-like documents, and focus on optimizing the accessibility of the data through good full-text document search that can assemble an overview by showing document snippets (i.e., allowing to get a broad cross-document overview through document previews, rather than requiring opening each document individually).
I guess some kind of especially important data, such as information on current medication or drug intolerance should really be kept in a fully structured format to enable clinical decision support, but for a lot of other information, a light-weight system based on unstructured data combined with good information retrieval tools would already improve on the status quo quite significantly.