Establishing foundation, roadmap for interoperability

This week, the federal government continued its interoperability efforts, revealing initial plans for its interoperability roadmap and approving a set of recommendations from the JASON Task Force that calls for the establishment of an orchestrated architecture based on public APIs as the foundation of interoperability.

During an Oct. 15 joint meeting of the Health IT Policy and Standards Committees,  Erica Galvez, manager of the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT’s interoperability and exchange portfolio, outlined a plan that incrementally builds interoperability over time. “There is lots of room for improvement but we’re not starting from zero. We’re focusing nationally on establishing a best minimum possible—a floor of interoperability across which all key players can participate and innovation can flourish.”

Building the interoperability roadmap will require unprecedented collaboration, she said, and the process must describe who should do what by when to make sure interoperability expectations are met.

Later in the day-long meeting, the JASON Task Force shared its conclusions that current interoperability approaches are functionally limited and need to be supplemented and gradually replaced with more comprehensive API-based models.

“The idea doesn’t mean that current approaches are barren or without use, but they have limited functionality,” said Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative and Jason Task Force co-chair. A public API “is an improvement over what we have today. It's a transition. We want to begin this transition.”

Meaningful Use should be leveraged as a starting point to this transition, he said.

Tripathi and the other task force co-chair David McCallie, MD, vice president of medical informatics and director of the Cerner Medical Informatics Institute, laid out and received approval for six recommendations, including a market-based exchange architecture and core data services and profiles to define the minimal data and document types support by all public APIs.

Do you think we're making progress on this important subject? Please share your thoughts.

Beth Walsh

Clinical Innovation + Technology editor