The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT  has promoted developing unified standards for electronic health records as a primary goal, as it is expected to lead to greater interoperability. So what lies ahead in the arena of standards for next year?

Dr. John Halamka, the chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the co-chair of the HIT Standards Committee, recently wrote on his blog, Life as a Healthcare CIO, that one of the earliest tasks the HIT Standards Committee will tackle is to develop simplified quality reporting measures.

He wrote that it is critical to create quality measures that are based on data already generated by an EHR during the course of a physician's standard workflow. This saves doctors from preparing data at a separate time. Furthermore, he recommended the development of a simplified method for submitting data on quality measures and a flexible query language that can be adjusted at a later date.

As the requirements for meeting meaningful use become more stringent, reporting on quality measures is expected to play a larger role in the program. This is why it will be important to develop reporting standards that do not further burden physicians.