Health IT interoperability up to market, say feds

The co-chairs of the federal Health IT Policy Committee's Jason Task Force (JTF) are advocating a mix of mostly market-led initiatives and some government action to spur adoption of open standards for electronic health information sharing in the US. In comments to InformationWeek on Monday, David McCallie and Micky Tripathi of the JTF both recommended an approach where healthcare providers and vendors of healthcare systems take the lead in addressing technology interoperability issues, with the government intervening where necessary. The Jason Task Force, an ad-hoc working group of the Health IT Policy Committee, was established to review the findings of a federally commissioned study conducted last year on the requirements for an electronic health data infrastructure in the US. Jason stands for JavaScript Object Notation, a language-independent data format.