One of the common causes for sub-optimal performance of large-scale enterprise systems is lack of
data synchronization. Our recent experiences with a large Federal Government Agency brought this fact to us with increasing clarity.

Imagine a large network of hospitals, where a patient can go to any one of 130 medical centers. Imagine also that this network of hospitals can be connected to the external entities such as pharmacies, private hospital chains and the like.

Imagine further that there are approximately 26 million patients in the network and the objective is to maintain a unified patient record that keeps the most comprehensive data about the patient all the time, including radiology reports and drug interactions.

As you can see, the problem at hand requires a lot of synchronization of data across multiple data sources. It is very challenging indeed!

This is an area where the Federal Agencies can benefit from the good work done in the private sector. One of the premier not-for-profit organizations named GS1, based in Brussels, Belgium has been successfully implementing the concept called GDSN (Global Data Synchronization) across large enterprises in the world. For more information, visit:
GDSN

Data Synchronization and Data Normalization are areas that require increasing attention from the computing industry.


Sastry Dhara