The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT released a paper outlining a 10-year plan to achieve an interoperable health IT infrastructure in an effort to reduce costs while improving population health and patient engagement, FierceHealthIT reports (Bowman, FierceHealthIT, 6/5).

Details of Paper

The paper -- titled "Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: a 10-Year Vision to Achieve an Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure" -- outlines goals the agency hopes to achieve over a three-, six- and 10-year time period (DeSalvo, "Health IT Buzz," 6/5).

Within three years, the agency expects to have:

• Developed a nationwide interoperability roadmap based on current health information exchange approaches; and
• Leveraged technologies that promote query-based data exchange and point-to-point data sharing.

Within six years, the agency expects to have:

• "Enhanced interoperability" to allow health care providers from various settings -- including schools and prisons -- to share patient data; and
• Integrate currently disparate information sources, such as multi-payer claims databases and clinical data registries, into the health care delivery system.

By 2024, the agency said it expects patients to be able to use their own personal electronic devices to:

• Manage their data; and
• Share their data across various platforms with multiple providers.

In order to achieve these goals, ONC said stakeholders need to focus on five essential building blocks:

• Creating core technical standards and functions for interoperability;
• Developing a certification process for the adoption and optimization of products and services;
• Improving protections against privacy and security threats;
• Getting business, clinical and regulatory parties on board; and
• Creating rules of engagement and governance (FierceHealthIT, 6/5).

In a "Health IT Buzz" post, National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo wrote, "These building blocks are interdependent and progress must be incremental across all of them over the next decade to realize this vision" ("Health IT Buzz," 6/5).