White House Council Calls for Health IT Universal Data Exchange

Federal efforts to encourage electronic health record adoption among medical practices should broaden to include a "universal exchange language" that allows real-time access to networked health data, says a report from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Data in EHRs--which federal policy encourages physicians to adopt through a combination of monetary incentives and promises of future Medicare reimbursement penalties for not adopting them--is mostly locked up into proprietary formats. Efforts to date to enable data exchange have been inadequate,  and federal requirements for inter-EHR systems communication have been only "very modest," the report says.

Future waves of "meaningful use" guidelines for EHRs from Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services should include standards for a nationwide health data extensible markup language, the council recommends.