Leverage today's standards for meaningful use

[Commentary] Dr. David Blumenthal, director of the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology, recently urged the healthcare industry to break down barriers to electronic exchange of healthcare information in order to improve the quality of care and better serve patients. To reach that goal, we must develop a greater degree of interoperability among healthcare IT applications than we have today. To discard the existing data interchange standards and to replace them with something new and "simpler," as some are proposing, would be counterproductive. Instead, we need updated and simplified tools and processes that leverage the existing standards and produce the needed interoperability. Specifically, the HITECH legislation requires the reuse of data for decision support and for quality evaluation.