Health IT has helped drive progress in health care over the last decade, but it has also introduced a variety of different challenges, many reported by the clinical community. As we explored in our latest article published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, ONC and other federal partners have taken and continue to take steps to reduce clinician burden when using health IT. 

Today’s health information ecosystem is broadening in terms of participants and data availability. The data sources that exist to inform clinical and biomedical research are more diverse than ever, drawing from electronic health records (EHRs), genomic tests, recordings from wearable devices, and patient surveys, to name a few. The insights that can be drawn from these require effective data collection, aggregation, and sharing in addition to health IT infrastructure capable of supporting research goals. To address some of these requirements, ONC has been focused on accelerating an ecosystem that uses standardized, application programming interfaces (APIs). 

ONC released new data on the methods hospitals used to exchange summary of care records in 2019. More than half of hospitals engaged in all four domains of interoperability (e.g., send, receive, find, integrate). The percent of hospitals with the capability to integrate data into their electronic health record (EHR) increased by nearly 15 percent from 2018. View the complete brief, Use of Certified Health IT and Methods to Enable Interoperability by U.S. Non-Federal Acute Care Hospitals, 2019.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has published a special emphasis notice (SEN) under the Leading Edge Acceleration Projects (LEAP) in Health Information Technology (Health IT) funding opportunity NAP-AX-18-003. The goal of the funding opportunity is to advance health IT standards and tools to improve social determinants of health data exchange and research, and to develop tools for making electronic health record (EHR) data for research and artificial intelligence (AI)-ready.

Even if you’re not a standards guru, it’s not a stretch to say that standards help the world go ‘round, especially in the world of health information technology (health IT).  

ONC is excited to share the 2021 Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA) Reference Edition. Whether you’re a policy wonk, a software developer, or a public health pro, there’s a little something for everyone this year.  (And if you are a standards professional, you might want to track the ISA’s RSS Feed – requires RSS Feed viewer – to stay on top of all changes to ISA, in real-time.)   

Many of the changes this year are iterative in nature, but a few are noteworthy.