Gregory Maciag

Delicious Data

This is the first time I ever saw data standards called “delicious”. The Washington Watch blog used the word in a piece on the DATA [Digital Accountability and Transparency] Act, saying that while they support the Act, “those delicious data standards” and mandatory publication of data by agencies is more important than a new board of officials.

In the abstract, standards wrapped in laws are all you need. In reality, standards need people to build, maintain and extend them. Designing a good set of data standards is not a once-and-for-all task. Rather than setting some best practice in stone, we're directing a continuous and complex research, negotiation and publication process that's embedded in the real-world needs of a diverse community.

Delicious Data and GSA Scandal

Standards Organizations

I like this thought from Michelle Marlborough:  “It seems that the need for a new standard is partly driven by desperation – a realization that we are in a bit of a mess. The process of development of a consensus-based standard is then, by necessity, a long and slow process. And so we find ourselves in a bit of a bigger mess and with a mammoth task of implementing the standard and unraveling the already created mess.”

I've seen this pattern repeat itself many times. One of the aims of standards organizations must be to abstract the “despair” phase and to smooth the “unraveling” phase. So, we must make people aware of their need for standards so that they don't have to experience despair.

We can do this by drawing their attention to standards successes in other fields of endeavor and bringing the real costs of “mess” to life. In the standards creation and implementation phase, we need to provide facilitation so that the wood and the trees come into focus, and so that progress is captured and built on.  Geeks Talk Clinical

 

Electronic Health Records and EHR Standards

Arjen Westerink asks: “What it will take to encourage EHR [electronic health record] vendors to develop truly interoperable EHRs?” Collaboration and competition seem to be irreconcilable forces. “So far, there is little financial incentive to support true interoperability, and if anything, many vendors see some level of proprietary distinction as desirable – creating barriers to customer defection,” he writes.

He asks whether government should stimulate standards or whether the industry should wait for standards to emerge. The problem with this, as I see it, is that the industry can't hang around waiting for either eventuality. In particular, I don't believe that industry standards emerge by themselves any more. The kind of de facto industry standard that we used to see in, say, punch cards, was driven by closed intellectual property - patents and copyrights. That's not going to happen in healthcare data standards, and any organization nurturing the idea that it can produce a proprietary standard that will be taken up by the industry is kidding itself.

Data professionals in the healthcare industry need to get together and create standards. They need them for the growth of the industry. Trying to establish islands of dominance is not a tenable strategy. To do so is to fight yesterday's battles instead of building a bright tomorrow. Interoperability is coming – so bring it on.

Health Management Technology

Thanks!

The staff of both ACORD and LOMA want to thank you for attending the ACORD-LOMA Insurance Systems Forum in Orlando last week.

 

Telematics

Good quotes from Marcia Bernier on ACORD's development of standards in telematics, as reported at the 2012 Insurance-Canada.ca Technology Conference (ICTC). The article also contains interesting comments from Sandy Dunn at Wunelli, who is launching a UK-based telematics standards initiative: “Insurers have a small window of opportunity to agree to a common data standard. As an industry we need to grasp the opportunity now, while telematics is still in its infancy in the UK, or we will find ourselves facing the same issues insurers faced, for example, in sharing 'No Claims Discount' information.”

I echo this but add: think wider than UK. We can get this right for the entire industry and save everybody time and money. At the very least, UK-based insurers will want a standard that works across Europe and, increasingly, globally.

For a contrary view, check out the comments from Insurethebox's Mike Brockman in Insurance Times. He makes a “competitive advantage” argument for non-standardization. Hmm. I'm getting visions of the Sony memory stick. (Don't remember the Sony memory stick...? My point exactly.)

The Intersection

Insurance Times

Cost of Poor Data Management

Experian notes an important cost of poor data management that is usually overlooked: distracted management attention. It's well known that poor data management can result in poor decisions, but it's less widely appreciated that it can also undermine decision timelines and distort the scope of decisions. (These are my terms, by the way, which I offer in addition to the comments in the Experian piece.)

I wonder also if we've become too comfortable with the idea of information overload. Since we all know there's lots and lots of data washing around our world, no one's going to yell at us if we're not on top of it. Being distracted by data issues is an acceptable form of distraction. I'm not saying that anyone consciously treats data management as a scapegoat in this way, but nevertheless it happens.

We have to remember that it's not data we need, it's relevant data. Data management is the discipline that specializes in relevance.  Cost

Texting for Agencies

Clients are increasingly texting their agents and preferring to receive texts from their agents, creating the challenge as to how agencies manage this form of communication. In this article, the author discusses the challenges agencies face with texting, how agents can send texts to their email to document the conversation and how agents can use their email to send texts to their clients who prefer this method of communication. We are hopeful that more efficient ways to attach texts to agency management systems and to send texts from these systems will be developed in the future.   Download Texting For Insurance Agencies

Realtime & Download Survey Results

The Real Time/Download Campaign was founded to champion the adoption of Real Time and Download for independent insurance agencies and companies. Real Time provides agencies with a consistent workflow through agency management systems or comparative raters when doing business with multiple carriers.  Here is a copy of the Survey.  Download Agency Survey Report

Data Standards - How Global Can We Go?

ACORD's Shane McCullough and Lloyd Chumbley meet with Carrie Burns (Insurance Networking News) to talk about driving change in standards-setting and implementation.

Download INN Data Standards - How Global Can We Go

 

Insurance Data & Analytics Summit New York

ACORD and Reactions Magazine launched the new IDA Summit in New York City on April 25th. If you did not attend, please plan to do so next year.  We will keep you posted on the dates. Here is the agenda and copies of the presentations.

 

 

 

Download IDA Agenda 

Download Reinsurance eBusiness

Download Tom Paparatto RMS

Download Richard Hoehne IBM

Download Ajay Bhargava TATA

Download Forrester

 

Meet the Brick

Soon, everything that's produced - and some consumers - will have a standard identifier. The standard is called the GS1 Global Product Classification, and its base level is known as a brick. Common Identifier