On May 9, 2016, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) announced the Move Health Data Forward Challenge to promote innovation in the area of consumer-mediated exchange. We challenged the health information technology industry to help find new technological ways to put consumers in the driver’s seat when it comes to how and when their health information can be shared.

Read Full Post.

Last week at Health Datapalooza 2017, Adam Culbertson (HIMSS Innovator in Residence at ONC) and I gave a five minute “coming attraction” presentation about a patient matching algorithm challenge ONC will launch in June. For the uninitiated, we use “patient matching” in health IT as shorthand to describe the techniques used to match the data about you held by one health care provider with the data about you held by another (or many others).

Read Full Post.

In our everyday lives standards enable tasks to be completed more efficiently, reduce configuration costs, and add predictability in markets that can help the lower barriers to entry for innovative products. However, experience has shown that just because technology includes “standardized” capabilities they are not necessarily used to their fullest extent nor are they always implemented in a “standardized” manner. From a health information technology (health IT) perspective, this is especially true when other non-standard/non-computable options exist (e.g.,

Read Full Post.

Health data often travels a long distance before it gets to its final destination. Additionally, data can be represented in a number of different ways. For example, health care providers can use health data at the point of care, researchers can use it for discrete data analysis or as part of a large research data set, and individuals can use it to better manage their care. Data can be converted, mapped, merged, and, let us not forget,

Read Full Post.

On January 10, ONC submitted the recently published 2017 Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA), a catalog of standards and implementation specifications that are or could be used to advance the seamless and secure flow of electronic health information, to the Health IT Policy and Health IT Standards Committees for review and discussion.

Read Full Post.