A report recently released by JASON, an independent group of science and technology experts that often advises the federal government, calls on HHS to use meaningful use stage 3 to promote a standardized, national health IT architecture that would be a significant step toward interoperability.
"The criteria for stage 1 and stage 2 meaningful use, while surpassing the 2013 goals set forth by HHS for electronic health record adoption, fall short of achieving meaningful use in any practical sense," according to the report. HHS has the opportunity with meaningful use stage 3 to un-silo data with national standards that would foster data exchange for the national improvement of healthcare.
The ideal software architecture would have the following features, according to the report:
- Be type, scale, platform, and storage location-agnostic when it comes to data
- Use open standards and protocols and public open application programming interfaces
- Encrypt data at rest and during transmissions
- Separate key management from data management
- Include with all data transmissions the corresponding metadata, context and provenance information
- Represent the data as atomic data with associated metadata
- Follow the "robustness principle": liberal in what is accepted and conservative in what is sent
- Provide a migration pathway from legacy EHR systems
"To achieve the goal of improving health outcomes, stage 3 meaningful use requirements should be defined such that they enable the creation of an entrepreneurial space across the entire health data enterprise," according to the report.
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