Information blocking occurs when persons or entities knowingly and unreasonably interfere with the exchange or use of electronic health information. This report focuses on potential information blocking by health care providers and health IT developers, including vendors of EHR technology.
Here's the April 2015 report from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) to the US Congress explaining the obstacles to implementing interoperability and informatics standards. The federal government has spent $28 billion on health IT and Congress wants to know the details of information blockage.
This report (see link below) from ONC to Congress was discussed at the April 21 meeting of the Illinois Health Information Exchange Advisory Committee. The gist of the discussion was that the pilot studies on EHR interoperability have been excellent, but further progress will be difficult due to the reluctance of vendors and stodgy institutions to adopt existing informatics standards, especially HL7 standards. The Chair likened the situation to selling cars, saying that the states will have to mandate features that software must have in a manner similar to emission standards for cars. Our dental software vendors are lagging also.
http://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/reports/info_blocking_040915.pdf
The DICOM Editor, David Clunie informs that the 2015b release of the DICOM standard is now available from the NEMA ftp site:
ftp://medical.nema.org/MEDICAL/Dicom/current/
It is also indexed from the DICOM Editor's status page at:
http://www.dclunie.com/dicom-status/status.html
This replaces the 2015a release.
Release notes are at:
ftp://medical.nema.org/medical/dicom/current/output/pdf/releasenotes_2015b.pdf
The changes from the 2015a release are shown highlighted in PDF files; note that changes to figures are not detected and some changed figures are not rendered in the diff files:
http://www.dclunie.com/dicom-status/status.html#DiffsStandard2015a2015b