HITPC endorses workgroup’s interoperability roadmap recommendations
The Health IT Policy Committee formally endorsed interoperability roadmap recommendations during its Dec. 9 meeting.
Interoperability and health information exchange workgroup chair Micky Tripathi, who serves as CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, received approval for the following recommendations for the interoperability roadmap:
- Explicitly endorse and map to the JASON Task Force report recommendations, which include a coordinated architecture and public APIs.
- Identify specific market motivating implementation actions that the federal government could/should/will take to promote interoperability. The committee recommends aligning the roadmap with the JASON Task Force, which provides a framework for escalating government actions to motivate the market.
- Define measures of interoperability status and progress. The measurements should focus on outcomes as much as possible with a decreased emphasis on transactional and process measures.
- Explicitly set the context for the roadmap. There is a need to decide whether the level of detail is directional or specific, or whether it’s prescriptive.
- Map actions to actors. The roadmap should identify which actors are expected to implement the various actions and milestones outlined in the roadmap.
Tripathi said during the workgroup’s deliberations that a few specific areas were called out for inclusion in the roadmap. First, orders have a big gap in vocabularies and this needs to be addressed. Also, the roadmap should make clear that existing approaches will continue to be refined as required.
“We did feel overwhelmingly that the roadmap is a tremendous and important piece of work,” said Tripathi, commending the leaders for working to put the first version out for engagement and comments. “We hope the recommendations are helpful to ONC.”
The agency is expected to formally release the interoperability roadmap next month.