Health IT Interoperability Standards Released By ONC
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
Healthcare is charging into interoperability, and the Office of the National Coordinatory for Health IT (ONC) has released guidance to smooth things along.
The 2016 Interoperability Standards Advisory was released on December 22, 2015. The 79-page document is intended to “coordinate the identification, assessment, and determination of the ‘best available’ interoperability standards and implementation specifications for industry use to fulfill specific clinical health IT interoperability needs.”
As compared to the 2015 advisory, this year’s advisory has been “significantly updated and expanded” in just one year. The most notable changes are structural and include the following:
1.A set of six, informative characteristics are now listed with each standard and implementation specification to aid readers.
2.Each “interoperability need” has two subsections; one which identifies known limitations, dependencies, or preconditions that are associated with best available standards implementation specifications, and a second that includes known “value sets” and “security patterns” associated with the best available standards and implementation specifications.
3.An appendix dedicated to security standards to direct stakeholders to entities that curate and maintain relevant security standards information
4.A summary of public comments received (not incorporated into the 2016 ISA)
5.A revision history
Perhaps the most notable of all the changes is the addition of the six characteristics added to the advisory. They are as follows and described by ONC:
- Standards Process Maturity…conveys a standard or implementation specification’s maturity in terms of its stage within a particular organization’s approval/voting process.
- Implementation Maturity…conveys a standard or implementation specification’s maturity based upon its implementation state
- Adoption Level…conveys a standard or implementation specification’s approximate and average adoption level in healthcare within the United States.
- Federally Required…conveys whether a standard or implementation specification has been adopted in regulation, referenced as a federal program requirement, or referenced in a federal procurement (i.e., contract or grant) for a particular interoperability need.
- Cost…conveys whether a fee is involved to purchase, license, or obtain membership for access or use of the recommended standard or implementation specification.
- Test Tool Availability…conveys whether a test tool is available to evaluate health IT’s conformance to the standard or implementation specification for the particular interoperability need
According to the ONC blog, “The Interoperability Standards Advisory is a critical element of our delivery system reform vision where electronic health information is unlocked and securely accessible to achieve better care, smarter spending, and healthier people. It is part of our near term strategy — laid out in the Interoperability Roadmap — to build on our health IT success to date in order to drive more user friendly technology and connect the current infrastructure.”