HITPC: More analysis of JASON data infrastructure report findings

During the Sept. 3 Health IT Policy Committee meeting, the co-chairs of the HIT Policy and Standards Committee’s JASON Task Force presented draft recommendations based on the JASON advisory group’s report on developing a data infrastructure for the nation’s healthcare system.

Micky Tripathi, CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative and David McCallie, senior vice president of medical informatics at Cerner, shared findings from listening sessions, the assumptions made in the report and shared their group’s preliminary recommendations.

The co-chairs said the JASON report concludes that Meaningful Use Stages 1 and 2 have not achieved meaningful interoperability “in any practical sense” for clinical care, research, or patient access due to the lack of a comprehensive nationwide architecture for health information exchange (HIE).  The report noted the lack of an architecture supporting standardized APIs and recommended urgent focus on creating a “unifying software architecture.”

However, Tripathi said, "we believe that JASON did not adequately characterize the progress made in interoperability, though we agree that there is considerable room for improvement." Because JASON findings were made 18 months ago, six months before the start of MU Stage 2, the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC) should take into account the current state of interoperability as well as current trends before incorporating JASON findings in any decisions on HIE plans, policies and programs, the group said.

Tripathi said market demand for interoperability is growing rapidly as is the growth of value-based purchasing, rising consumer expectations and standards of care.

The task force addressed the JASON report’s focus on open APIs as a potential source of innovation but said the technical availability of APIs would need to be accompanied by business processes to support healthcare specific concerns and general business concerns.

While JASON advocates using MU Stage 3 as the primary lever for provoking the industry changes that it would like to see, the task force said that as the MU program ramps down, the importance of effectively orchestrating other federal levers will be critical success factors in providing some channels for standardization.

The JASON task force has four more meetings scheduled and will add in more if they need to. For example, the task force needs to spend more time with the JASON “privacy bundling” concept before issuing recommendations.