An April report from JASON, an independent group of science and technology experts that often advises the federal government, calls on HHS to use meaningful use stage 3 to promote a standardized, national health IT architecture that would be a significant step toward interoperability.
"The criteria for stage 1 and stage 2 meaningful use, while surpassing the 2013 goals set forth by HHS for EHR adoption, fall short of achieving meaningful use in any practical sense," according to the JASON report, because of a lack of interoperability. The report then calls for a "unifying software architecture" based on public application programming interfaces to allow for more robust health information exchange.
While the ONC's JASON task force agrees there is still much work to be done to advance interoperability, the group concluded the report overlooks advances in interoperability that have been made in recent years. Much of this progress has been driven by providers' increased need for interoperability to be successful in accountable care organizations and similar initiatives, and EHR vendors have made improvements in their products to meet this growing demand.
This market responsiveness has led the task force to recommend future interoperability efforts rely more on market forces and less on meaningful use or other government programs. Because barriers to interoperability extend beyond the technical, the task force agues it will take more than technical changes and requirements to improve interoperability.
"ONC should take immediate actions to motivate a public-private vision and roadmap for a nationwide Coordinated Architecture for Health IT," according to the task force. "This coordination should target enabling and encouraging HIT market forces towards developing data sharing networks that can leverage a new public API that exposes core data services and core data profiles."
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