ONC reveals final interoperability roadmap
ONC on October 6 finalized its eagerly awaited interoperability roadmap. "Data needs to be free," said national coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD. "If we're going to change the care model we need an information model to support it." That thinking is at the heart of the report, Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: A Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap, which DeSalvo labeled a critical part of the broader delivery system reform effort.
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Key takeaways from ONC's interoperability roadmap
The ambitious 166-page draft document published by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT on October 6 lays out the "critical actions that the public and private sector need to take" toward real and robust nationwide data sharing. Some of our readers pointed out that a unique patient identifier is critical to the road map, yet thus far, Congress has avoided dealing with this thorny topic.
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EXTREME essentials for interoperability
Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association in June, two health IT researchers put forth five use cases that help define what an "open" electronic health record should really look like. Dean F. Sittig, professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and Adam Wright, medical informatics researcher in the Department of General Internal Medicine, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, use the term EXTREME – it stands for EXtract, TRansmit, Exchange, Move, Embed – to shape a definition of useful interoperability.
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GAO: 5 barriers to interoperability
in its report Electronic Health Records: Nonfederal Efforts to Help Achieve Health Information Interoperability, GAO identified five stubborn barriers to interoperability.
I1.nsufficiencies in health data standards
2. Variation in state privacy rules
3. Difficulty in accurately matching all the right records to the right patient
4. The costs involved in achieving the goals
5.The need for governance and trust among entities to facilitate sharing health information
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athenahealth, Cerner, Epic shine in KLAS interoperability report
It's been almost six years since the Senate HELP Committee has revisited EHRs and interoperability, and at a hearing March 17 on Capitol Hill, there was an overarching theme among industry stakeholders: that talk is long past due.
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Interoperability (finally) takes center stage in Congress
Seven engineers from Madison, Wisconsin, all of them former employees of healthcare EHR giant Epic Systems, have landed $3.5 million for their software company Redox. It's their first round of venture funding. Luke Bonney and Niko Skievaski founded Redox in 2014. The Epic alumni who run Redox are aggressive about interoperability, and they claim it's easier to achieve than it seems. They call it "turnkey interoperability."
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Former Epic engineers land $3.5M for interoperability startup
Industry insiders seem more determined than ever to push forward on interoperability. In March, we talked with some of the key leaders in the field: National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, AMIA CEO Doug Fridsma, MD, Joyce Sensmeier, RN, Joyce Sensmeier, RN, HIMSS vice president of informatics: and Charles Jaffe, MD, CEO of HL7 for their perspective on what's next for interoperability.
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Interoperability: Just ahead or still far off?
Which electronic health record system is the easiest and most effective to connect to? KLAS put that question to "customers, non-customers and vendors" and at least one of the top three might surprise a few users and health IT professionals. The vendors who look good in the KLAS report are athenahealth, Cerner and Epic.
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DeSalvo at HIMSS15: 'True interoperability, not just exchange
In her keynote April 16 at HIMSS15, National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, said it's now time to "focus beyond adoption" of health IT and create an interoperable, learning health system "upon the strong foundation we all have built."
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15 interoperability geeks to watch
