If the ONC’s draft interoperability roadmap is to guide American healthcare to the intended destination — the promised land of better, less expensive care through information technology — it will need to galvanize “unprecedented collaboration” among all stakeholders.

The buy-in will need to be broad on, among other agreed-upon objectives, outcome-focused need and aligned economic incentives. Plus, interoperability requirements must be consistent across federal, state and private programs.

The ONC itself (the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT) said so last week, when it released an updated draft version of its 10-year plan for getting there on interoperability. It debuted the roadmap last June, defining it as a means to achieve “a fully interoperable infrastructure of coordinated care and communication across health care providers, patients and public health entities that improves health care quality, lowers health care costs and improves population health.”

The updated draft incorporates feedback received since June. It sets goal dates and parameters for governance and standards that, if all goes according to plan, will yield an IT-enabled healthcare system that is fully interoperable by 2020 to 2024.

What will the end result look like? The updated draft describes several hoped-for stakeholder scenarios:

• Patients and their families will “regularly track and share electronic information from wearable, implantable, biometric medical devices.” They will also have increased access to longitudinal health information.
• Providers will likewise have increased access to longitudinal health information, enabling them to “precisely tailor care to each individual based on information about environment, occupation, human services, genomic data and cutting-edge research evidence.”
• Public health officials at the community and state levels will be better able to “contain outbreaks and proactively manage disasters with electronic information from many sources,” including medical research driven by “large aggregations of standardized genomic and device data.”

Interim steps include providers and patients being able to send, receive, find and use basic electronic health information by 2017 and, by three years later, their being able to access more granular info while seamlessly using remote monitoring devices.

The ONC rolled out the updated draft in Washington at a joint meeting of two of its Health IT committees, one focused on policy and the other on standards.

“We have heard loudly and clearly that interoperability is a national priority, and that there is value in this effort spearheaded by ONC as the federal government’s coordinator of health IT policy,” wrote ONC head Karen DeSalvo, MD, and interoperability manager Erica Galvez in a blog post announcing the updated draft. “It is also apparent that there is enthusiasm, capability and a willingness to cooperate and collaborate in ways not previously seen.”

Soon it will be known whether that was an accurate assessment or just happy talk. The office plans to publish a second draft, open for public comment, in January. The final version, or at least “Interoperability Roadmap 1.0,” is due out in March.

Click here to read the current draft (PDF).