Interoperability Matters

A Public-Private Cooperative Solving Discrete Health Information Exchange Challenges

In 2018, The Sequoia Project launched Interoperability Matters, which engages experts from across the healthcare and healthcare IT communities to identify, prioritize, and collaborate on the most pressing, discrete challenges to nationwide health information sharing.

How Does It Work?

  • The Interoperability Matters Leadership Council prioritizes discrete barriers in health information exchange.
  • Workgroups are formed of subject matter experts and critical stakeholders from across industry and government for each prioritized issue.
  • Each workgroup informs the Leadership Council with regular, virtual updates to solicit broad consensus on developing recommendations.
  • Recommendations of the workgroup are then shared with the public to seek input from those impacted by the work.
  • The final work product is a consensus-built resource and plan of action for the healthcare sector to leverage and implement to minimize or eliminate that particular barrier to exchange.

What Are The Issues?

The Interoperability Matters cooperative will focus first on information blocking in anticipation of the proposed rule from Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). Additional priorities (and workgroups) will be identified at upcoming Sequoia Project meetings.

The Sequoia Project Patient Identity Management Workgroup

The Sequoia Project Patient Identity Management Workgroup was formed before the development of Interoperability Matters, but provides an example of the kind of actionable artifacts we intend to produce. The workgroup dispositioned public comments for A Framework for Cross-Organizational Patient Identity Matching. The final recommendations provide a list of minimally acceptable patient matching practices and a patient matching maturity model.

Learn More About the Patient Identity Management Workgroup.

To get Interoperability Matters notifications and nominate yourself for a workgroup complete the form below: