EHRA Recommends Changes To ONC's Standards Advisory Proposal

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

While the EHRA is in agreement with most of the ONC’s Standards Advisory Proposal, the organization has some recommendations to the proposal’s intended use, specifically when it comes to refining it in order to avoid misinterpretations.

According to HealthIT.gov, the ONC’s 2015 Standards Advisory Proposal outlines the model which will be used by the ONC to “coordinate the identification, assessment, and determination of the best available interoperability standards and implementation specifications for industry use toward specific health care purposes.”

The executive summary explains, “The 2015 Advisory’s scope focuses on clinical health information technology (IT) interoperability. Specifically, the scope does not include transactions governed by regulations published to implement provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).”

The HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association has issued a response to the proposal, writing in an email that, while their organization agrees with most of the choices of the ONC’s choices in evaluating the best available standards, the intended use of must be revised as to avoid any misinterpretations. The EHRA’s response proposes changes to six areas of the Standards Advisory Proposal.

1. The intended use of the Interoperability Standard Advisory needs to be further refined to avoid misinterpretations, especially in relation to regulation and the Interoperability Roadmap.
2. Explicit principles need to be defined to ensure stability/sustainability, and to promote long-term backward compatibility
3. EHRA believes that the “HIT Standards Committee or one of its sub-groups” is not the right body to conduct the comment resolution. We believe that a dedicated advisory committee for this task would be more effective and provide more technical rigor.
4. Improve the consistency in placing standards and Implementation Specifications in the appropriate column, including placing value sets as Implementation Specifications.
5. EHRA recommends using another Standard and Implementation Specification in the case of Publish and Subscribe, and suggests Implementation Guides for Imaging Exchange.
6. EHRA recommends the inclusion in the 2015 Standards Advisory of only C-CDA R1.1, given that the deployment of C-CDA R1.1 is still in an early stage and the unresolved compatibility issues between C-CDA R1.1 and the proposed C-CDA R2.0.