Dive Brief:
- The ONC has come out with the 2016 Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA), which provides guidance on current and emerging federal standards for national interoperability efforts.
- The office notes this version includes "significant structural changes," which were shared in a fall comment period, that expand the advisory's depth and breadth.
- The most significant change is the inclusion of what the ONC describes as six informative characteristics for each of the advisory's standards and implementation specifications.
Dive Insight:
The new characteristics are intended to provide more context on the maturity and adoptability of the standards and implementation specifications, ONC says, as well as assist in setting a baseline for tracking progress on standards and implementation specifications, such as when they get updated or retired, moved from draft to final or pilot to production, or reach a high level of adoption.
"As we mark today’s milestone, we want to thank everyone that has contributed to this new process," wrote Steven Posnack, MS, MHS, director of the Office of Standards and Technology, and
Chris Muir, director of the HIT infrastructure and innovation division at the Office of Standards & Technology, in a Health IT Buzz blog post. They concluded, "Even though we are marking the publication of the 2016 Standards Advisory today, our work with you will begin again at the start of 2016. The ISA is a continuous, annual process where we make updates and improvements in order to keep pace with developments in the health IT industry—and the draft 2017 Advisory will be published in only nine 'short' months."