There's a lot of talk about what's wrong with healthcare and how it uses IT these days. What's odd about it is that as politicians talk about the challenges associated with IT in this sector; they make it sound like nothing has been happening. In fact, they basically come right out and say they whole healthcare process today is still dominated by paper-based processes.

Granted, there's a lot of work that still needs to be done when it comes to automating the healthcare process. But the real problem within any sizeable healthcare organization is not the lack of IT. Rather, it's the simple fact that there isn't much in the way of real interoperability because all the systems being used in various hospitals are based on applications that have proprietary formats. That means that even if a hospital did make an electronic health care record available to another organization; chances are good that the other system wouldn't be able to read the document anyway.

That's why one of the most important IT healthcare projects current under development is a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) that is being built by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Using an HL7 file format, which is a derivative of XML that is being pushed as an open standard for healthcare applications, NHIN may be the industry's best hop of overcoming 30 years of legacy system architecture.

Based on software developed by Sun, NHIN is being positioned as the cornerstone of a Federal effort to create a interoperable file format for electronic healthcare records that span 26 different Federal agencies. In addition to this effort, the Federal government is also funding 15 other projects across various state and local healthcare organizations that use the same HL7 format. The basic idea here is that sheer weight of the all the Federal healthcare systems will effectively turn HL7 into a de facto standard that the rest of the healthcare industry will then adopt.

Other core Sun technologies that are being incorporated into the project include GlassFish, open source application server platform, the Java (TM) Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS) SOA Platform, and the Sun Java(TM) Identity Management suite. Four major government agencies and 16 private sector organizations are part of the initial project, which is dubbed NHIN-CONNECT.

In addition to help applications exchange data, the file format also identifies the patient and what policies are attached to that patient. In effect, this attaches identity management policies to the file in a way that make it possible to perform audits on the file to help cut down on fraud.

Political grandstanding aside, the work being done by the Department of Heath and Human Services has little to do with either Republicans or Democrats. Instead, the credit needs to go to all those unsung IT heroes within this department that, by sheer dint of perseverance and personal commitment, are solving one of the nations biggest problems with little to no fanfare.