ONC Establishes Proving Ground for Health IT Interoperability Projects

On the heels of announcing its Tech Lab this week, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has posted the Interoperability Proving Ground, an open, community platform to share short summaries of interoperability projects taking place across the country.

Steven Posnack, director, office of standards and technology at ONC, announced the Interoperability Proving Ground (IPG) platform in a Health IT Buzz blog post and said it represented the first outpost of the ONC Tech Lab approach.

“The IPG provides you with a simple way to share a succinct set of basics about your project (e.g., title, description, hyperlink to your project website) and “tag” it with any standards or keywords that may be associated with it (e.g., C-CDA, FHIR, PDMP, ADT). The data you share populate the main IPG home page so anyone can easily filter and search across the entire interoperability project database or view interoperability projects nationwide on an interactive map,” Posnack wrote.

Currently, there are 45 projects listed on the IPG site and users to the can filter the projects by “active projects” and “completed projects” and users can view a projects map that displays the locations of registered projects.

Posnack wrote that the purpose of the IPG is to enable the health IT community to share experiences and describe lessons learned when it comes to interoperability.

“The IPG is your chance to showcase your interoperability work nationwide, connect with peers tackling interoperability issues, and make visible progress toward a future where we are all part of a learning health system,” he wrote.

To jumpstart the IPG, ONC included many of its own interoperability-related projects and plans to coordinate with federal agencies to populate the IPG to represent their experience and interoperability projects.