“Federal health data officials called to view health information interoperability as a journey to be developed with end users and iterated over time rather than a major destination to reach all at once during last week’s Academy Health Datapalooza virtual conference.
Furthermore, interoperability is best achieved when the federal government articulates and defines data standards over time alongside partners…”
“Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Chief Data Officer Alan Sim emphasized that also being agile and intentional in what to make interoperable at first are critical.
‘Organizations can’t wait for long extended periods of times for the standards to be defined and implemented — so really understanding the use cases, electronic case reporting, electronic lab reporting, being agile in the way that we try to implement different standards as proof of concepts, learning from those experiences,’ Sim said. ‘Over time we have change management, and we can begin disseminating those lessons learned, so we can have more of an infrastructure from a standardization perspective.’…”
“With critical use cases, like Sim said, it’s easier to to focus on what standards are best for a given scenario, said Greg Singleton, director of the Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center, HHS’ cyber threat center. He used COVID-19 as an example for how HHS was able to connect data systems across over 6,000 different hospitals in the country to gather and consolidate information about the pandemic from those institutions…” Read the full article here.
Source: Health Data Leads Push for Iterative Approach to Interoperability – By Melissa Harris, February 22, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
