CONTENT

CONTENT matters.

I was at a conference last week with 17,000 people. It was a conference of users (health care providers), developers and related parties working with electronic health records.

I spoke with more than a handful of “integrators” – companies that can take clinical decision support CONTENT (the knowledge of what could be useful and when it could be useful for supporting clinical decisions) and integrate it with electronic health records so it will appear when it is useful, display how it is useful, and even facilitate workflow to make life easier for health care professionals.

As challenging as the technical efforts are to make this easy for the day-to-day practice of health care all of these CDS integrators faced the same challenge – CONTENT is difficult to produce, validate, and maintain. It is so important to have CONTENT that is current and accurate for this setting that systems are needed to produce, validate and maintain reliable CONTENT for CDS to scale.

If we do this well this can help us reach CONTENTMENT. And if not, CONTENTION.