DoD sources iEHR information from the broader health IT market

The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments are investigating what capabilities should be included in the forthcoming integrated electronic health record, or iEHR, by asking about the qualifications of EHRs currently on the market. The iEHR Joint Program Office posted July 18 a request for information on FedBizOpps.

In targeting the broader health information technology market, the departments hope to "gain better insight into the adequacy, availability and experience of potential vendors and their products with respect to supporting" the iEHR environment, says the RFI.

The RFI asks vendors about their use of open source licensing, their ability to reference a health data dictionary and security. Inquiries about secure coding practices, the use of external identity management provided via a web service and security in a cloud environment are among the security questions.

The RFI also asks vendors to describe their "experience applying standards in support of health information exchange" and explain their adoption of Health Level Seven International version 3 standards--and in particular, Clinical Document Architecture release 2, or CDA r2, an XML-based standard for the structure and semantics of clinical documents.

The departments want to know how vendors are currently resolving issues around data synchronization between local, regional and central sites. And, given that the iEHR will use a service oriented architecture, the RFI asks how vendors are "optimizing SOA services selection with respect to reusability, composability, autonomy, loose coupling and level of abstraction."

By Sept. 30, 2012 the departments plan to stand up an iEHR joint development and testing environment, and roll out baseline capabilities in two medical facilities in 2014. Full implementation of iEHR still isn't expected for 4 to 6 years.

For more:
- go to the RFI on FedBizOpps

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iEHR testing environment to launch by Sept. 30, reveals VA-DoD timeline
2014 version of iEHR will rely heavily on VistA, AHLTA