A new information-sharing company, Data Commons, is working on enabling faster and more efficient processing of data about health professionals from multiple organizations through a single data-hub.
Data Commons, which provides information about the professional characteristics of physicians, will use the Healthcare Professional Profile by MedBiquitous—a nonprofit standards development organization created at Johns Hopkins University--as a core component of its technology infrastructure. The product is expected to launch this fall.
In the new Data Commons system, each organization retains the security, integrity, and custodianship of its contributed data, which it then makes available to a “commons” or shared space via a single data hub—where it is accessible by data users.
The Healthcare Professional Profile provides a unifying language for credentials data ranging from a health professional’s name, identifiers, address, education, and training to certification, licensure, and more. The standard aims to enable faster and more accurate updating of credentials data, and is already in use at American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Board of Internal Medicine, the American Board of Medical Specialties, the American Board of Pediatrics, the American Board of Surgery, the American Osteopathic Association, CECity, the Federation of State Medical Boards, and Medscape.
“Data about medical learners’ credentials are scattered across a variety of systems,” Peter Greene, M.D., CMIO of Johns Hopkins Medicine and executive director of MedBiquitous, said in a statement. “MedBiquitous standards are key for bringing that data back together and allowing the learner and the larger system to use it effectively. We applaud Data Commons and its potential to be transformative in medical education by increasing data liquidity in ways that help both learners and educators.”
