ONC Releases HIE Toolkit For Rural Healthcare

The ONC has released a new toolkit designed to help rural healthcare players such as rural hospitals, critical access hospitals, clinics and state offices of rural health to participate in HIEs, iHealthBeat reports.

Here’s a summary of what the toolkit contains, courtesy of iHealthBeat:

The toolkit release follows on ONC head Farzad Mostashari’s announcement that this will be the year providers are pushed hard to go for interoperability.

Expect to see more efforts of this kind as ONC nobly soldiers along, suffering from a trimmed budget due to sequestration, attempting to close the gaps vendors seem loathe to close.

Yes, as Mostashari notes in an interview with HealthcareITNews, Meaningful Use Stage 2 pushes the vendors a long way toward interoperability:

Vendors are really going to have to step up to the plate in terms of being able to achieve the Stage 2 expectations for true vendor-to-vendor coded, clinical structured, documents being able to have kind of ubiquitous protocols with security in place. That’s a big step for the industry and meaningful use Stage 2 sets the tempo and expectations for that.

But vendors have proved amazingly agile at wiggling out of interoperability promises to date. Let’s see if MU Stage 2 finally breaks the deadlock.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

1 Comment

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories