When we issued our interoperability vision paper, Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: A 10-Year Vision to Achieve an Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure, in June, and the HHS Principles and Strategy for Accelerating Health Information Exchange last year, we promised that the journey would be collaborative.  I am pleased to say we are delivering on this promise and launching a new, interactive community on www.healthit.gov/interoperability-community.

Over the course of the coming months we will be drafting a document, with input from you – stakeholders who may be interested in contributing. The goal is to develop version 1.0 of a nationwide interoperability roadmap.  The roadmap will be a companion to our vision paper and dive deeper on how we can collectively achieve the 3, 6, and 10 year interoperability milestones described in the paper.  Our ultimate goal is to have a learning health system where accurate and evidence-based information helps ensure the right individual receives the right care at the right time to increase health care quality, lower health care costs and improve population health.

To ensure this nationwide roadmap represents the needs and interests of the nation, we need to hear from a broad array of stakeholders and their perspectives.  We have several efforts underway to gather feedback through listening sessions, subject matter experts, states, other federal agencies, and workgroups within our Federal Advisory Committees (JASON Taskforce and Governance sub-workgroup). 

The new community we are launching on healthit.gov is a general solicitation of public input for the nationwide interoperability roadmap.  The interoperability community is intended to give everyone an opportunity to provide input on the most critical elements of the roadmap, allows for comments and feedback and includes specific questions that need to be addressed.  We invite you to become part of the community, respond to some or all of the questions in a manner you prefer, and even subscribe to receive updates when others post their input and feedback.

We are asking that everyone provide their thoughts and comments by Friday, September 12, 2014.  That will give us time to synthesize all of the suggestions and feedback and account for as much of it as possible in the draft roadmap that will be presented to our Federal Advisory Committees for their input and recommendations in October.  We anticipate an updated version reflecting the Advisory Committee feedback to be posted for public comment in early 2015.

Please also note that we expect the roadmap to be a living document updated with collective input on a regular basis.  We know we won’t get everything right the first time around, but also know that achieving interoperability in health IT is a journey, not a destination.