Standards Summer Camp

At the April HIT Standards Committee meeting, Doug Fridsma kicked off the Summer of standards - an accelerated effort to support the regulation requirements of Meaningful Use Stage 2.

We've been hard at work with meetings and phone calls since then.   The schedule for standards deliverables has crystalized and here's what we've done and we're doing:

April
Certificate Recommendations

May
Metadata preliminary recommendations
Provider preliminary recommendations
Vocabulary preliminary recommendations

June
Metadata recommendations
Provider Directory recommendations
Patient Matching preliminary recommendations
Vocabulary recommendations

July
Patient Matching recommendations
ePrescribing of discharged medications recommendations
Syndromic Surveillance recommendations
Quality Measurement recommendations

August
Simple Lab Results recommendations
Transitions of Care recommendations
CDA Cleanup recommendations
NwHIN preliminary recommendations

September
NwHIN recommendations
Summary of all recommendations from Summer Camp

The June HIT Standards Committee will include reports from
a.  the metadata workgroup on patient identifiers, data provenance, and privacy flags
b.  evaluation of competing provider directory approaches - LDAP, DNS, and microformats
c.  an early look at strategies for patient matching

We'll also have to consider the implications of recent Policy Committee debate on Meaningful Use Stage 2.    As you'll see in their presentation, there are many requests for new standards.

We'll have an exciting few months ahead.   When our handoff is complete in September, ONC will turn our recommendations into a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking by December/January and the country will have a complete set of Meaningful Use, Standards and Certification regulations finalized in mid-2012.

Given that Meaningful Use Stage 2 will likely be deferred a year (organizations who attest in 2011, can begin the measurement period for stage 2 on October 1, 2013 with attestation on October 1,2014, receiving three years of payment based on stage 1 requirements), this timing should give the industry 18 months to rollout the software changes needed.