Communication standards: problems and future trends.

Communication standards are to facilitate the exchange of structured data and information between healthcare systems with different architectural concepts. Several national and international standard development organizations (SDO) are developing and maintaining standards, sometimes even for the same application. There is an increasing demand for a closer cooperation between SDO's and for a better harmonization of different standards going on. The current status of the most important standard application in healthcare is discussed and some further considerations for improving the harmonization process will be given.