The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has issued the final version of the Interoperability Roadmap, which “lays out the milestones, calls to action and commitments that public and private stakeholders should focus on achieving,” according to a blog post authored by National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, and Erica Galvez, ONC’s Interoperability and Exchange Portfolio Manager.

The draft version was released for public comment in January. ONC received more than 250 comments which were used to create the final version.

The roadmap is linked to the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2015-2020 and the 2016 draft Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA). ONC worked with federal partners to develop the plan, which illustrates how federal initiatives and programs help people, populations and communities achieve health and well-being through the use of health information and health IT. Finalizing and implementing the roadmap falls into Goal 4 of the Plan which aims to enhance the nation’s health IT infrastructure. The ISA represents the model by which ONC will coordinate the identification, assessment and determination of the best available interoperability standards and implementation specifications for clinical health IT.

In the near-term, the collaboration of stakeholders to fulfill the calls to action and commitments is critical to advancing nationwide interoperability.  Over time our collective efforts will shift to expand the interoperable health IT ecosystem to include other data sources and users that form a learning health system that puts the person at the center, can continuously improve care, public health and science through real-time data access.

The National Partnership for Women & Families offered its support for the Interoperability Roadmap which it said “is an important step forward in creating a learning health system in which all individuals, their families and care providers can send, receive, find and use electronic health information,” according to Debra L. Ness, president.

NPWF noted the emphasis ONC places on making patients and families partners in the continuum of care. “This is a welcome, powerful and badly needed new tool that can advance the kind of care consumers want and the nation needs.”

The organization also said it’s “happy to see that individual and family access to, and use of, health data and shared decision-making are now part of the core definition of interoperability. We are extremely pleased to see that the new roadmap includes a call for consumer engagement in the development of tools, a commitment by ONC to improve access to information for individuals, and strong support for using patient-generated health data in health care and in health research.”

Steven Tolle, chief strategy officer for Merge Healthcare, also offered his thoughts. “The most significant challenge to the ONC is not the Interoperability Roadmap itself; it is the need to tie that work to critical efforts underway for broader healthcare payment reform. Meaningful interoperability will only be achieved if it is aligned with payment reform strategies.”