In a recent blog post, Steve Wretling, HIMSS Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, shared an overview of HIMSS recent updates to our definition of interoperability. This definition is currently open for public comment to give the health IT community the opportunity to provide feedback to ensure that the new definition is comprehensive, and more importantly, relevant, to all within the ecosystem.

Feedback is requested by March 23.

Gathering and sharing accurate information on who has or has not been immunized and where the vaccine stockpiles may be located are important components of the public health strategy to overcome disease.
What’s next for immunization tracking?

HIMSS offered guidance on data sharing and calls on ACF (Administration for Children and Families) to work across HHS, state government agencies, and the entire community to encourage convening opportunities for education around the sharing of human services information.

Interoperability and usability are paramount.

With its Interoperability and Patient Access Proposed Regulation, which was released on February 11th at HIMSS19, CMS has taken the next step by outlining opportunities to make patient data more useful and transferable through open, secure, standardized and machine-readable formats while reducing restrictive burdens on healthcare providers.
What are the implications of this proposed regulation?

HIMSS has developed a comprehensive Blockchain in Healthcare Library for the health IT community to equip its members with foundational and practical knowledge related to this kind of distributed ledger technology.

Access resources on blockchain basics and more!

This session discusses the value and benefits of documentation standards as described by standards developing organizations. Examples of poor styles and relevant standards are provided. The speakers demonstrate how the consistent use of style in the healthcare record promotes clear communication, contributes to patient safety, and improves information exchange, integration, and aggregation.

This webinar is now available for streaming.

NLP is used to extract information from EHR free-text narratives written by a variety of healthcare providers on an expansive range of symptoms across diverse clinical specialties. The current focus of this field is on the development of methods to extract symptom information and the use of symptom information for disease classification tasks rather than the examination of symptoms themselves.

What are the key findings?

HIMSS is hopeful OCR can engage with the ONC and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to further define the minimum necessary requirements to promote the shift to value-based care.

How can we remove barriers to interoperability?

On Monday, February 11, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) continued its implementation of the 21st Century Cures Act with the publication of its proposed regulation designed to advance interoperability, support the access, exchange and use of electronic health information, and address occurrences of information blocking.

Explore the Key Provisions.

The model guides organizations towards a fully digitized imaging IT environment. The DIAM was previously available to assess radiology imaging related IT capabilities and has now been extended to assess and support multiple imaging services across the whole enterprise.

Learn more about this 8-stage model.