The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is looking to “Model-Driven Health Tools” to help create interoperability models and infrastructure for the health information technology community.
MDHT started within the open source, health and health IT community. The Office of Standards and Interoperability at ONC adopted MDHT into its S&I Framework to create the benchmarks, services, and tools to support standardization, said Acting Chief Scientist and Director of the Office of Standards and Interoperability Dr. Doug Fridsman.
The initiative establishes a modeling framework and infrastructure to help drive the development of seamless national health IT standards for open communication, model sharing, and standard development within the health and health IT community. The model had to be user-friendly, open to feedback, flexible, and current. MDHT currently has a growing user-based community from the public and private sectors.
“MDHT leverages models of existing standards to produce integrated and accessible guides along with actual working and tested software,” he said. “This approach replaces the current industry practice, which requires each participating organization to interpret the standard and independently develop its own standards. This consistency and commonality result in lowered development costs and fewer hurdles in establishing standards—problems that have previously prevented organizations from participating in electronic health information exchanges.”
