The Health and Human Services Department on Wednesday announced several new interoperability standards for health care information technology, paving the way for nationwide adoption of electronic health records.

Three new sets of IT standards aimed at enabling diverse systems to talk to one another took effect on Jan. 16, according to the  Federal Register..............

"We recognize that if we want interoperable health care and want [President] Obama's vision of e-health records by 2015, we don't need islands of hardware and software; we need a coordinated health care system," said Dr. John Halamka, chief information officer for Harvard University's Medical School and chairman of the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel, which established the standards..........

Obama has said establishing e-health records is a priority for his administration.

The three groups of standards use XML tags to define data elements common to all medical records.........

"The notion that there will be a single medical record system for the country won't work," said Halamka. "But we want a network of networks, where single hospitals and doctors can communicate with each other.......

The first set of new standards address how emergency responders access the electronic health records of patients involved in a mass incident such as a terrorist attack or natural disaster......... 

The second set of standards relates to how individuals access their own electronic health records and transmit them using a storage device such as a thumb drive or DVD.........   

The third group of standards is aimed at researchers and public health organizations seeking to use medical records to track patient care and make sure health care providers are using best practices......... 

Last year HHS recognized interoperability standards for personal health records as well as for biometric surveillance data. The Jan. 21 notice also contained some updates to those standards in keeping with the latest technological developments.