By Steven Posnack, M.S., M.H.S., Deputy National Coordinator for Health Information Technology
Twitter: @ONC_HealthIT
Steven’s Twitter: @HealthIT_Policy
What should 2030 look like because of interoperability? That’s what we asked our stakeholders back in May 2021. And boy, did you all deliver! We received an overwhelming number of submissions, north of 700 one-liners, from Twitter and HealthIT.gov. We even got video submissions from leaders in the field – thank you again!
Each “outcome statement” had its own personal twist on what the future should look like – what interoperability should make possible by 2030. You can review all of the original outcome statements on the Health Interoperability Outcomes 2030 page.
If you’d just like some bottom lines to read through, we created a set of synthesized outcome statements that are meant to reflect the collective sentiment we observed. We analyzed each statement and looked for trends, groupings, combinations, and other affinities across all of the statements. Ultimately, we word-smithed thematically similar statements to create (in most cases) broad outcomes for 2030 interoperability without expressing “how” each outcome would be reached. For example, we focused on the end state of individuals having internet-based access to their electronic health information instead of specifying that it would (only) be done via a smartphone. As you can imagine, this whole process was more of an art than science.
Now what? First, again, we’d like to thank everyone who participated. I for one was energized and learned a ton reading through each of the outcome statements. I know the staff here at ONC did as well. In terms of what’s next, we (obviously) encourage you to keep pushing forward on interoperability because these 2030 outcome statements are what’s at stake. Additionally, if the timing seems right, we’ll look to do another one of these open calls in a few years to see how things are going, if something new has emerged, and to benchmark how far we’ve collectively come.
In the meantime, please check out the Health Interoperability Outcomes 2030 page.
This post was originally published on the Health IT Buzz and is syndicated here with permission.