Proposed interoperability standards for patients’ access to their medical records and quality reporting are expected to be posted for public comment late this week.
Technical committees of the Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) drew up the draft standards documents, which lay out what existing technical and data standards should be used to enable the exchange of information among organizations and health care providers.
If all goes as planned, the American Health Information Community will accept the recommended standards at its December meeting.
Committee leaders told the standards panel at its meeting July 16 that there were gaps in the available standards and more development work remains to be done. The initial selections, however, represent building blocks for a future nationwide health information network that delivers medical records wherever they may be needed.
Dr. John Loonsk, interoperability and standards chief in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, said vendors of health IT systems are pushing for completion of standards so they can head off time-consuming and expensive retrofits of their products when standards are selected.
He said his office expects to provide more money for HITSP staff in the coming year as the workload of the standards panel, which ONCHIT supports, expands. The ONCHIT staff has begun developing new use cases, or scenarios, for situations in which health IT should be deployed, he said.
The use cases are for remote monitoring of patients, remote consultation with doctors, referrals and transfers of patients, public health case reporting, response management in emergencies, and personalized health care. HITSP is producing standards for four use cases this year, so six use cases represents a noticeable increase in the panel’s workload.
Dr. John Halamka, chief information officer at Harvard Medical School and HITSP’s chairman, predicted that the work might get easier because some standards, once selected, can be used again and again in different scenarios. But he said the panel is “working really, really hard” to craft a body of standards.
HITSP's mission is to harmonize existing standards. It's often said that health IT suffers from having too many technical standards, and the panel is supposed to select those that best achieve interoperability in each scenario.
Government Health IT presents Liesa Jo Jenkins, executive director of CareSpark, in this recent eSeminar, where she shared her experiences and insight into building a health information exchange that enhances community health, rewards regional collaboration and drives economic progress.
