According to an article in HealthData Management:
For the third year in a row, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has issued its Interoperability Standards Advisory, providing the healthcare industry with a listing of standards and implementation specifications meant to enhance the flow of electronic health information.
The 2017 Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA) serves as a coordinated catalog of standards and implementation specifications to be used by different stakeholders as a single public list focused on clinical health IT interoperability.
However, in an October letter to National Coordinator for Health IT Vindell Washington, MD, the American Hospital Association expressed its concerns that the draft 2017 ISA needed more detail to describe how ONC distinguishes mature from emerging standards.
It’s interesting to see such an open dialogue by the ONC to continue exploring data standards for use in health data exchange. Perhaps it shows the difficulty in getting so many stakeholders aligned to support a single standard, but creating rule for exchange will eventually require taking a stand that will exclude many less-used or less successful standards.
This sheer number of standards and different versions of the same standards in use in healthcare illustrates the need for healthcare organizations to remain flexible to work with multiple standards, not handcuffing innovation with limits on what data can or cannot be included based on the standards used.
That’s why Corepoint Integration Engine provides complete flexibility to users in the number of standards available for use. That flexibility not only creates an “of course we can do that” approach to incorporating new systems or workflows, but also provides key insights into how the data is flowing between applications and organizations, allowing proactive decisions that improve patient care.
