ONC: Interoperability standards are not optional

Writing on the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT's (ONC) blog, Health IT Buzz, ONC Office of Standards and Interoperability Director Doug Fridsma, MD, stated that vendors should have little choice in deciding whether their products will adhere to national standards.

“Reducing optionality improves interoperability and lowers the cost for vendors to implement, thus lowering the cost for healthcare providers as well,” Fridsma wrote.

“ONC is identifying the vocabularies, the message and the transport of ‘building blocks’ that will enable interoperability,” he continued. “While vendors should be able to flexibly combine them to support interoperable health information exchange (HIE), these ‘building blocks’ need to be unambiguous and have very limited (or no) optionality.”

The Dec. 7 blog post highlighted several ONC initiatives that aim to encourage standardized document structures, lab result specifications, transportation specifications, public health reporting and sets of vocabularies.

Read Fridsma’s whole post here.