The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has released for public comment its shared nationwide roadmap for interoperability.
The roadmap’s goal is to provide steps to be taken in both the private and public sectors to create an interoperable health IT ecosystem over the next 10 years, according to ONC.
One of the main focuses on the roadmap is to enable “a majority of individuals and providers across the care continuum to send, receive, find and use a common set of electronic clinical information at the nationwide level by the end of 2017.”
In addition, the roadmap is also linked with President Barack Obama’s recently announcement Precision Medicine Initiative, which aims to increase the use of personalized information in healthcare, ONC announced.
“HHS is working to achieve a better healthcare system with healthier patients, but to do that, we need to ensure that information is available both to consumers and their doctors,” HHS Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell said in the announcement. “Great progress has been made to digitize the care experience, and now it’s time to free up this data so patients and providers can securely access their health information when and where they need it.”
Along with the roadmap, ONC also released a draft of 2015 Interoperability Advisory Standards, which “represents ONC’s assessment of the best available standards and implementation specifications for clinical health information interoperability as of December 2014.”
The roadmap is garnering praise from industry leaders, including from the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives. CHIME said in an annocement that is “welcomes” the Interoperability Standards Advisory today as part of the roadmap.
“This is a much-needed playbook for each and every health IT professional,” CHIME President and CEO Russell P. Branzell said in the announcement. “Now, healthcare providers and health IT developers have a single source of truth, with an extensible process to align clinical standards towards improved interoperability, efficiency and patient safety. While we have made great strides as a nation to improve EHR adoption, we must pivot towards true interoperability based on clear, defined and enforceable standards.”
The draft road map stems from, and is a more robust version of, a vision paper published in June by ONC. The ultimate goal of ONC in developing the road map is to build a continuous learning health system. The interoperability roadmap is also part of the ONC’s overarching Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, which spans from 2015 to 2020.
“As a draft, this roadmap needs the input from knowledgeable, engaged stakeholders and, in particular, areas where important actions or milestones may be missing,” according to ONC.
To learn more:
– here’s the roadmap (.pdf)
– check out the Interoperability Advisory Standards (.pdf)
– read the announcement
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