While the greater U.S. healthcare industry focuses on interoperable information systems, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is working with governments from Europe and elsewhere to develop common international standards.
With the goal of increasing patient access to health information internationally, the agency and its counterparts are trying to create “building blocks for interoperability,” ONC’s chief science officer, Doug Fridsma, MD, wrote in a recent blog post.
The ONC and the National Institutes of Health’s Library of Medicine are working with the European Union’s epSOS EHR interoperability project in a multi-year collaboration that’s currently focused on identifying “international vocabularies for medications, problems, administrative and disease monitoring, and laboratory tests that can serve as a draft international standard for medical concepts,” Fridsma wrote.
The current work follows a memorandum of understanding from 2010, signed by HHS and the European Commission establishing a guide for collaborating on international health IT interoperability.
The ONC is also analyzing different content standards for healthcare summary documents used in the U.S. and in E.U. countries. Fridsma, previously an informatics professor and internist at the Mayo Clinic Arizona, said the aim is to “leverage work in the EU and the consolidated CDA to get agreement on an internationally recognized way to structure healthcare summary documents.”
Over the next several years, the groups are going to be taking industry and stakeholder feedback, and putting together recommendations for aligning standards. The groups are developing use cases and analyzing vocabulary, infrastructure, security, exchange functions and clinical models, with pilot projects set for 2014.
Fridsma explained the ONC is focused on finding ways that allow for both provider-mediated and patient-mediated information exchange, “making sure that patients have access to their own health information,” Fridsma wrote. “While we enjoy such rights in the United States, this is by no means an international right.”
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