Solor - Healthcare Interoperability

In today’s health care environment, there is a wide-range of systems used for managing patients’ electronic health records (EHR). This means when a patient sees a new doctor, in the private-sector or in a publicly funded health care system, the information transfer from one EHR system to another may be incompatible, incomplete, or contain errors – all of which can lead to real safety concerns. Solor, an award-winning Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) initiative, is tackling this problem by redefining how health care information needs to be interpreted to truly achieve the promise of health care information technology (IT): to improve patient health outcomes and safety. Founded by Dr. Keith Campbell, Director of Informatics Architecture at the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), Solor can translate and integrate the many, varied terminologies used in electronic health records into a unified language understood by all. Current systems require a manual mapping process, which is costly and error-prone. Solor can overcome this issue by transforming and simplifying the representation of clinical data, while retaining its semantic meaning when data is transferred. By using open source software for this transformation, Solor enables developers to collaborate and convert any user-supplied terminologies into a single, shareable model. This dramatic simplification represents a paradigm shift in how developers consume terminology, and thereby enables collaborative improvement in medical knowledge, patient care, and patient safety.