Interoperability a big topic at HIMSS14
Not surprisingly, interoperability was a big topic at HIMSS14. In her keynote address, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Marilynn Tavenner called upon the audience to continue their efforts and work through the challenges of Meaningful Use. Interoperability is key to further improvements, she said.
To get to interoperability, “build in incremental steps and don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” said Doug Fridsma, MD, PhD, chief science officer, Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), who also spoke during a session at HIMSS14.
Interoperability is essential to achieving the ONC’s goal of transforming the industry into a learning health system.
Fridsma cited five pillars necessary to support interoperability and said that the MU framework supports incremental progress toward interoperability.
Getting to interoperability requires not only exchange, but the successful use of data, he said. “If you exchange information in a language or format that the other can’t understand, you really haven’t achieved interoperability. It has to be grounded in what you want to do.”
Central to ONC's standards work is the Standards & Interoperability Framework, a consensus-building online platform to harmonize vocabulary, content, structure, services and security.
Fridsma reported strong participation in the S &I Framework, with 2,100 meetings since it was launched three years ago. So far, it has seen 5,000 ballot comments on standards, with nearly 4,000 resolved, he said.
There were health IT happenings beyond the largest annual conference HIMSS has held to date. For example, CMS is working on a centralized database to help providers determine public health agencies and registries' readiness to receive patient data from certified EHRs.
The agency issued a notice of the plan in the Feb. 7 Federal Register, which invited the public to comment.
Do you think healthcare is moving along the path to interoperability? Please share your thoughts.
Beth Walsh
Clinical Innovation + Technology editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.