Standardization in practice. Examples from health care.

This article presents and analyzes the feasibility of two different standardization strategies in health care. The standardization strategies analyzed are an evolutionary, "minimalist" one and a specification driven one respectively. The first is the strategy used to develop Internet applications and protocols. The latter is the strategy followed by most standardization bodies, including those developing standards for information exchange within health care. The data was collected using ethnographic techniques like interviews and observations. This study supports a hypothesis saying that an evolutionary standardization approach is more successful when designing computer systems supporting communication in large heterogeneous organizations such as health care.