Ryba’s 16 Rules of Effective HIE
Joel Ryba, COO, HIXNY
As a fan of the relational database, and the inventor of the relational model, the late Ted (Edgar F.) Codd, I have drafted a brief set of rules that I believe an HIE must comply with to be completely effective.
These rules are not for any particular type of exchange. Whether you implement stone carvers with chisels, paper and fax, peer-to-peer electronic exchange, federated repository, or a centralized repository; HIE quite simply must support these tenets to be effective.
When Dr. Codd introduced his rules for relational database management systems in 1985, it was in response to the market starting to introduce products that they said were RDBMS but actually were not. So in order to protect the relational model, which he introduced in 1970, Codd threw down the gauntlet, defining what a real RDBMS should be. And his rules stuck.
Today, we have the same issue of older products being packaged as health information exchange IT. Thus, I feel it is necessary to put out a list of rules that an HIE must meet to be effective.
Here, then, are Ryba’s 16 rules of HIE: