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Monday, February 2, 2015

The ONC Standards Advisory

ONC published the 2015 Standards Advisory last week, a first of its kind document talking about the best available standards for various uses.  These includes:

  1. Vocabulary/Code Sets/Terminology
  2. Content/Structure
  3. Transport
  4. Services
Notably missing are standards for privacy and security, but this is by design.  According to the publication:
An explicit stand-alone category for “security standards” was purposefully omitted because security standards for information exchange using the internet are commonplace and not unique to health care.

This document is a first for ONC, in that as an assessment of standards, it shows an awareness of available standards that I don't always see in this space.  There were no big surprises here, not really should there be.  I might argue some of the finer points, but the broad strokes are solid.

I could wish that such a document was produced at the beginning of all of this Meaningful Use stuff, but as is the case with every program of that magnitude, we must muddle around until we find something that works.  Here, I'm speaking in the collective "we" of the taxpayer, which really means: our government. And while they may have muddled getting to producing this document, the content is actually pretty good, and furthermore it appears as if this will be a regular thing.  Good.  We need something like this.

   Keith

P.S.  I'll be back later this week to talk about the Interoperability Roadmap, also published last week.

1 comment:

  1. It appears that a messaging layer is missing. Transport tells me how to connect between entities. Content tells me what is transported, but not what to do with it. The messaging layer needs to be independent from the content and transport.

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