When All Developers are Not Above Average ...

The reality of the world is that we don't all develop out of an office in Lake Wobegon.  Not all developers are above average.  Healthcare is challenging, we already know that.  By passing that challenge onto developers, we are simply transferring risk to the developer.  Making the hard stuff easy mitigates the risk, and makes it less likely for developers to do it wrong.

I talked about this earlier this week at ONC's Beyond Boundaries meeting, in the context of "Fit for Purpose" Standards.  The human mind has a remarkable capacity to find and take the easiest path. We need to design our standards with that in mind, and use those human factors IN the standard itself.

Good standards tell developers what to do to do the right thing.

Better standards tell developers how to tell if they are doing the right thing.
Great standards make it easy for developers to do the right thing.

Good standards are testable.
Better standards have tests readily available.
Great standards are computably testable*.

Good healthcare standards make health information exchange possible.
Better healthcare standards make health information exchange reliable and accountable.
Great healthcare standards make health information exchange easy.

I'll talk about measuring easy in a future post.

   -- Keith

* All the data necessary to validate conformance to the standard is readily available, from data models to value sets and everything in between.