You might call them the “interoperability geek squad” – in the best sense of the word, of course.
A trio well versed in the ins-and-outs of interoperability, standards and smart apps seemed to have the audience beguiled with their discussion of all things technical happening at ONC, at health systems across the country and also with software developers and vendors.
The hook, of course: better patient care.
ONC Director of the Office of Standards and Technology Steven Posnack and Chris Muir, division director of HIT infrastructure and innovation at ONC gave the audience examples of work underway to make the three-year-old Interoperability Roadmap a practice rather than a static document.
They include digital initiatives, such as interactive web tools being used to measure just how well the industry is doing on the road to interoperability, and means for stakeholders to vet standards – what Posnack called an “interoperability proving ground.”
And, in beta, a Consolidated CDA scorecard that makes it possible for organizations to rate themselves against other organizations.
“We want to be able to enable collaboration, engage the community,” Posnack said.
CDA is an HL7 specification for structuring clinical documents as XML with varying levels of structured data. Consolidated CDA is an implementation guide from HL7.
The third speaker in the trio, Josh Mandel, MD, a physician and software developer, told the audience about the pilot project “Sync for Science, also referred to as “S4S.”
It’s what he called a collaboration among researchers at the Harvard Medical School Department of Biomedical Informatics, electronic health record vendors Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, drchrono, eClinicalWorks, Epic and McKesson, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the National Institutes of Health.
As Mandel sees it, all the participants benefit in this alliance.
Once the pilot is fully implemented, it will allow individuals to connect a research app to their electronic health data, making it easy for individuals to donate data for research.
It gives patients access to the potential benefit from participating in research studies and it reduces the time staff spends on data requests because the data flow is automatic via a patient portal.
S4S supports the goals of the Precision Medicine Initiative, and individual data donation is a critical piece.
This article is part of our ongoing coverage of HIMSS17. Visit Destination HIMSS17 for previews, reporting live from the show floor and after the conference.
