The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has entered into a cooperative agreement with Integrating the Health Enterprise USA to jointly advance interoperability goals.

WHY IT MATTERS
Together, ONC and IHE – a not for profit interoperability initiative launched in 2010 by HIMSS and RSNA – will work to innovate the technical standards needed for more effective data exchange and to reach the milestones identified in the Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap and the 21st Century Cures Act.

The two organizations will lead stakeholders from across the healthcare industry in an effort to create and update new standards, profiles and implementation guides, helping to transition to more modern APIs and emerging standards such as HL7's FHIR protocol that make it easier to  exchange data securely via smartphone.

Among the goals of the partnership, ONC and IHE plan to update IHE profiles that support the use of FHIR as an alternative or complement to existing IHE document based exchange specifications, publishing the updates as publicly available IHE Technical Profiles.

They'll also work together to advance developers' testing and adoption through IHE North American Connectathons, HL7 Developer Days and more. In addition, they'll encourage IHE USA and others in the standards community to provide continuous feedback based on lessons gleaned through profiling and real world testing.

THE LARGER TREND
This is the second recent partnership announced by IHE. This past week, the group said it will work with the Personal Connected Health Alliance to help simplify the collection and sharing of health data generated by personal health monitoring devices and mobile apps to improve continuity of care.

ON THE RECORD
"We look forward to working directly with IHE USA to advance greater standardization and interoperability in areas of national interest," said Dr. Don Rucker, national coordinator for health IT, in a statement.

"We look forward to working alongside ONC and our stakeholder partners to more rapidly achieve interoperability in our health ecosystem," added IHE USA President Joyce Sensmeier, RN.