The current health information system interoperability effort promoted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is to develop a standardized electronic health record integrated with a complex federated network, while insisting that all users “speak” the same complicated language (HL7 V3, SNOMED, ICD-10, etc.).

In December of 2010 the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology recommended a Universal Exchange Language (UEL) as a novel, more powerful method for health information exchange that could provide a better environment for public health, health services, clinical and biomedical research. In response to this report, a group of individuals with biomedical informatics, medical semantics, and mathematics expertise, who became founders of Quantal Semantics, Inc. prepared a draft open proposal for a QuantalUEL that incorporated graphics, number and probability theory as well as quantum mechanics and could be used to “shred” and “unshred” de-identified health information for storage in and retrieval from a Secure Health Data Cloud.