The Alliance, which collaborates with healthcare and government leaders to influence healthcare decision-makers, says that its standards directory is the premier collection of health IT standards, and currently contains more than 2,100 listings for health IT standards and links and information for the 430 organizations that created them. The information will be used to expand National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST’s) HealthCare Standards Landscape web-application and database.
The Landscape database, containing information on healthcare standards, organizations, and related information, is a key tool for the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), which has been charged with harmonizing the abundance of health IT standards in order to enable and support widespread interoperability.
This effort is a critical step in the drive toward a national health information network. Sponsored by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), HITSP was created through funding by the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology.
The Alliance’s pioneering work on identifying and collecting health IT standards, many of which are in conflict or overlap, exposed the urgent need to harmonize standards to attain interoperability, commented Tom Rhodes, NIST information technology specialist, who led the development of the Landscape database.
