Standards

Much progress has been made to develop data and transport standards for Stages 1 and 2 of meaningful use, and as the NeHC webinar held September 13 pointed out, there is still much work left to be done to harmonize standards in healthcare. As part of the activities for National Health IT week, NeHC hosted a webinar devoted to the discussing the current Standards and Interoperability (S&I) Framework pilots and how its activities apply to current work being done in the industry with transitions of care, health information exchange, and population health.

CMS followed Health IT Policy Committee in stressing the importance of making health information readily available to patients after a visit.

Connectivity and integration are inherent challenges for hospitals using disparate biomedical devices across a complex care setting. Virtua, a four-hospital health system based in Marlton, N.J., has taken a serious look at the issue following a review of its patient-care IT portfolio of applications. Although Virtua had embarked on installing an EMR system well ahead of meaningful use as part of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, recording the data from bedside devices was still a manual affair, according to CIO Al Campanella.

Members from the HIT Policy and HIT Standards Committee concluded this week that recommendations first laid out in the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) report are too ambitious, echoing CHIME’s comments submitted in January. According to the PCAST workgroup, an end-to-end universal exchange standard that utilizes metadata tags instead of standardization is simply not feasible for Stage 2 Meaningful Use inclusion.

While at HIMSS last week, I got a chance to sit down with Lee Barrett, Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC)’s executive director, to get an update on his organization’s newest accreditation program, the Health Information Exchange Accreditation Program (HIEAP), as well as how its other certification programs are going. Last year we reported that UHIN’s cHIE in September was the first HIE to be certified by EHNAC (Farmington, Conn.). Currently, there are three more HIEs going through the certification process, according to Barrett, but it’s too early to release the names of those HIEs. The HIEAP not only accredits HIEs, but also vendors over roughly a six-month period with several steps, including a site visit.