By Daniel Stein
On May 1st, 2020, NIC webinar, held in collaboration with Healthcare IT Connect was titled “Interoperability Insights” – and that’s exactly what the team of presenters provided. Specifically, they highlighted some of the key learning that’s taking place in the national initiatives – including Gravity, Da Vinci, Carin and FAST – that are part of the strategic efforts of the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) to improve information sharing, interoperability, technology and information architecture. In addition, there was a presentation about Project Unify, NIC’s proof-of-concept initiative that aims to link health, human services and other domains through a replicable, open-source API model.
The content of the webinar had originally been planned as an interactive session at the in-person HIT Connect Annual Conference, which unfortunately had to be postponed because of the coronavirus crisis (along with almost all other events). The good news is that we were able to adapt the session to provide many of its principal elements online. Alas, one thing we couldn’t do was present NIC’s almost-famous Interoperability Mural Gallery, which was going to be a highlighted feature of the in-person conference.
Over time, the initiatives discussed during the webinar will strengthen the nation’s capacity to share information and use it for data-driven decision-making to improve health outcomes, equity and operational effectiveness. Indeed, once these efforts are operational, they should help us to navigate many current challenges and to build technical resilience to address the effects of COVID-19 and other future emergencies.
We look forward to working with the ONC and its accelerator projects over time to ensure that, ultimately, we’ll have better systems to share actionable information across all relevant domains. We know that this will become even more important over time because the pandemic has already laid bare the many negative aspects of our current systems, notably including racial and socioeconomic inequities.
Related Discussions in the NIC Webinar Series:
- Gravity Project: Documenting select data for use in medical systems to operationalize the social determinants of health
- Da Vinci Project: Addressing the needs of the Value-Based Care Community by leveraging the HL7 FHIR platform
- Carin Alliance: The Impact of Public and Private Healthcare Innovations
- FAST: Getting There FAST: Barriers and Solutions for Adopting FHIR
Project Unify's upcoming webinar, May 22, 2020. Learn more and register >>
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