Standards Vital for Meaningful Use
David MuntzMuntz said the ONC has been using standards for the basis for innovation, and the S&I Framework that launched in January 2011 represents one investment and approach adopted by the Office of Science and Technology to fulfill its charge of prescribing health IT standards and specifications to support nation health outcomes and healthcare priorities. Currently, there are more than 500 committed members and 376 organizations working with the S&I Framework to develop standards.Standards as a Platform for Meaningful Use CertificationMuch of the work that has been completed by the S&I Framework is embedded into meaningful use Stage 2 certification standards, such as requiring electronic health records (EHRs) to share information including a care summary and relevant documentation, as well as giving patients the ability to view, download, and transmit their personal health record.“Certification of health information technology provides a certain assurance to purchasers and other users that an EHR system offers necessary technological capability and has the right functions to do what’s right for themselves,” said Muntz. “Certification also provides patients and providers confidence that the products and the systems they are using are secure and will work with other systems. All of these things together ensure that meaningful use is real and doable.”The S&I Framework is an example of how government can create a collaborative process to implement standards and harness the expertise of the community to empower it to create better solutions, said Doug Fridsma, M.D., director, Office of Standards and Interoperability, ONC.“Our hope is as they [S&I Framework workgroups] think about the questions they need to answer to achieve interoperability, they have to make sure they’re standardizing meaning, standardizing structure, standardizing transport, standardizing security, and standardizing those services that help enable all those pieces to fit together effectively,” said Fridsma. “By doing those [things] we begin to create building blocks that are reusable so that a transitions of care structure can use different vocabularies and value sets to define problems or medications and can be transported in different ways depending on the kind of technology available and the kind of information that needs to move.”