Plenty of questions for NHIN standards

Mary Stevens, Editor

There was no shortage of stakeholder questions awaiting Douglas Fridsma, MD, PhD, director of the Office of Interoperability and Standards at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, after his presentation earlier this month. An avalanche of questions can be hard to face, but usually it’s indicative of a high level of interest, which was certainly the case with health information exchange (HIE), and the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) in particular.

The first question I’ll post here is probably one that every health IT practitioner has thought of at least once:

Q: “If the computing/IT industry has produced many interoperability frameworks (e.g., what OASIS has produced or is producing), why can’t we just reuse/adapt/extend these frameworks to health IT?”

A: It will be important for us to leverage existing vocabulary repositories and provide those as a resource for folks who are looking to develop HIE in a standardized way. We have to be able to use existing exchange protocols and specifications and we have to be able to adapt supporting tools. ... Part of our job will be [to] provide a much richer description of the kinds of information and services that might be required for information exchange. We must also make sure that the tools we build leverage existing tools, but if they don’t meet our needs then we have to be able to develop new tools that will support the NHIN and the goals that we have for supporting HIE.

Q: Will harmonization of standards occur throughout all sub-departments/groups within HHS?

A: That is difficult to say at this point. It is not our charge right now. Our goal is to be able to support meaningful use, to support the Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER) project and to support the federal partners who are working on achieving meaningful use. To the degree that we collaborate with and coordinate with the Federal Health Architecture and the VLER folks, we should be able to provide some degree of coordination. It is important to note that this is really intended to solve specific problems. When there is a need to exchange information among different departments, then I think that is when we need to think about making sure we do that in a coordinated way.

Q: Is coordinated information exchange a reality at your facility?
Let me know at mstevens@trimedmedia.com.

You can find more of the Q&A and a transcript of this National eHealth Collaborative web presentation here.

Mary Stevens
Editor of CMIO