The June HIT Standards Committee

The June HIT Standards Committee focused on novel transport standards for patient mediated exchange, an overview of patient/family engagement tools, updates on formulary downloads, use cases for image sharing, and lab ordering standards.

Dixie Baker and David McCallie presented the NWHIN Power Team review of the emerging transport standards for consumer exchanges that I believe will accelerate all types of interoperability in the next few years - the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR, pronounced "Fire") initiative , the RESTful Health Exchange (RHEx) Project and the Blue Button Plus (BB+) Initiative.   It's clear to me that the combination of REST for transport, OpenID/OAuth2 for authentication/authorization, and FHIR for content will be a winner as we scale interoperability to the national level.

Next, Leslie Kelly Hall presented the efforts of the Consumer Technology Workgroup to prioritize patient and family engagement standards including structured data capture from forms/questionnaires and care plans.

Jamie Ferguson, with John Klimek from NCPDP, presented the preliminary recommendations of the Clinical Operations Workgroup for adoption of formulary standards.    We also discussed use cases for image exchange (provider to patient, provider to provider, provider to care team) and endorsed the S&I framework efforts on lab ordering standards.

Finally, Doug Fridsma and Set Pazinski provided an ONC update.

A very good meeting with exciting new standards evolving to support Meaningful Use Stage 3 and beyond