The ONC released its 2016 Interoperability Standards Advisory Tuesday. The ISA is a component of the near-term strategy the ONC laid out in its Final Interoperability Roadmap in October to produce more user-friendly technology and connect the current disparate health IT infrastructure.
The 80-page ISA is "a coordinated catalog of existing and emerging standards and implementation specifications developed and used to meet specific interoperability needs," according a post on the ONC's Health IT Buzz webpage by Steven Posnack, director of the Office of Standards and Technology, and Chris Muir, director of the OST's HIT infrastructure and innovation division. The ISA includes structural changes, including six informative characteristics for each standards and implementation specification it contains.
"We believe that these characteristics will help provide stakeholders with more context regarding the relative maturity and adoptability of standards and implementation specifications," the authors wrote. "They also help set a baseline that will allow us to track industry progress over time as standards and implementation specifications get updated and retired; move from draft to final; mature from pilot to production; and grow from low to high adoption."