More than 300 members of the health IT industry pre-registered for the ONC's 2017 Technical Interoperability Forum, which took place Tuesday and Wednesday, according to Politico Morning eHealth.
The meeting discussed standards and technical issues in health IT, specifically honing in on three goals: identify use cases, address current and future challenges, and understand steps to improve information sharing. Some attendees told Politico the forum was a bit of a letdown.
Here are six reflections from the event, as reported by Politico Morning eHealth.
1. "We didn't get any good consensus on the question of: What is nationwide interoperability? Will we know it when we see it, or will the goal lines keep moving and we'll be chasing it forever?" said Micky Tripathi, president of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative.
2. Jeff Smith, vice president of public policy for the American Medical Informatics Association, said he felt the day was more of an "environmental scan" that allowed the new administration to adjust to the progress industry members have made towards interoperability.
3. The ONC did not address how or when it will define information blocking.
4. There was no indication when HHS would name its three appointees to the Health IT Advisory Committee.
5. The Department of Defense and Veteran Affairs Interagency Program Office avoided discussing its implementation of the new EHR, although its chief engineer did discuss some aspects of its new EHR.
6. On the contrary, Aneesh Chopra, co-founder and CEO of NavHealth told Politico that "Dr. Rucker's clear goals to get patient data access right, to challenge the community to add an [application programming interface] use case for 'institutional accountability' and to seek input on defining 'open APIs' was particularly helpful (and clarifying)."
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