To make the government’s electronic health record standard setting process more transparent, the Office of the Nation Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) announced that it will begin issuing voluntary certification criteria on a more regular basis than it has in the past.

The 2015 criteria put out on Friday as a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is meant as a guide to help EHR vendors plan strategically, a system to bring forth more stakeholder input and, perhaps most importantly, a way to speed progress toward the type of interoperability in EHR systems that may finally allow the government to begin realizing some cost savings in return for all of the money it has spent on incentives to providers for adopting EHR systems in the first place.

In the introduction to the rule, the ONC noted that it had missed opportunities to advance interoperability in the past because of less frequent updates to standards. The new goal is to update the voluntary criteria every 12 to 18 months. This is the first time ONC has proposed an edition of certification criteria separate from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' "meaningful use" regulations.

The criteria cover a lot of familiar ground, but also address some sticking points in interoperability in new ways. For example, there is an attempt to create stronger incentives for EHR systems created by competing vendors to talk to each other. Earlier regulations had put an emphasis on making sure the sending EHR system in transitions of care provided patient data in a usable format. However, there was no incentive for the receiving EHR system vendor to make sure its product could indeed correctly accept properly formatted patient data. The new criteria ask that receiving EHR systems accept correctly formatted patient data at least 95 percent of the time.

The ONC reassure providers in the rule that they would not be required to use the 2015 edition criteria to meet meaningful use requirements. In addition, it added a session about the proposed rule to the 2014 Health Information Management Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) meeting happening this week. The rule is open for public comment through April 28.