Every day, across the nation, all of us in the health IT community are collectively tackling interoperability challenges. At ONC, we are focused on providing you with the chance to inspire colleagues, share experiences, and describe lessons learned when it comes to interoperability. We believe that doing so will maximize opportunities for collaboration, cooperation, and communication when it comes to: making it easier for patients to be an active member of their care team; enabling health care providers to send, receive, find, and use health information when and where it is needed; and fostering a vibrant and innovative health IT ecosystem.

That’s why we are proud to announce the Interoperability Proving Ground (IPG), the first output of our ONC Tech Lab approach. In short, the IPG is an open, community platform where you can share, learn, and be inspired by interoperability projects taking place across the nation. The IPG provides you with a simple way to share a succinct set of basics about your project (e.g., title, description, hyperlink to your project website) and “tag” it with any standards or keywords that may be associated with it (e.g., C-CDA, FHIR, PDMP, ADT). The data you share populate the main IPG home page so anyone can easily filter and search across the entire interoperability project database or view interoperability projects nationwide on an interactive map.

No matter how big or how small, every interoperability project you add to the IPG will make a difference and enrich the IPG’s potential for the entire health IT community. The IPG is your chance to showcase your interoperability work nationwide, connect with peers tackling interoperability issues, and make visible progress toward a future where we are all part of a learning health system.

To jumpstart the IPG, we’ve already included many of ONC’s interoperability-related projects and will continue to update the IPG on an ongoing basis. We will also coordinate with federal agencies to populate the IPG to represent their experience and interoperability projects.

Now, it’s your turn. If you lead an interoperability project, join us and add it to the IPG.