The Experience of Interoperability Thus Far

As I travel across the country and listen to CIOs struggling with mandates from Meaningful Use to ICD-10 to the HIPAA Omnibus rule to the Affordable Care Act, I'm always looking for ways to reduce the burden on IT leaders.All have expressed frustration with the health information exchange (HIE) policies and technologies for care coordination. quality measurement, and patient engagement.As a country, what can we do to reduce this anxiety?Meaningful Use Stage 1 brought some interoperability especially around public health reporting. Stage 2 brought additional interoperability, with well defined content, vocabulary, and transport standards for transitions of care.Most CIOs have implemented certified EHRs and the required standards.  Here’s a capsule summary of what I’ve heardHL7 2.xHL7 messaging addresses lab result and public health use cases very well.   Lab results interfaces are straight forward, however there is still some need to reduce optionality in implementation guides so that the average lab interface costs $500 and not $5000.    Public health transactions for immunizations, reportable lab, and syndromic surveillance are standardized from a content perspective but  there is still a need to specify a single transport mechanism for all public health agencies.CCDA/DirectCCDA documents address transitions of care use cases reasonably well.  CCDA is easier to work and parse than CCD/C32 because it has additional constrain...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - Category: Technology Consultants Source Type: blogs