One year ago today I saw the CEOs and Sr. Executives of 5 top HIT vendors put away their competitive nature and make a pledge to build seamless, plug-and-play interoperability into their products, all for the common good. In order to turn this vision into a reality, technical teams from all the companies came together under the working group name Standards, Technology & Implementation Group to accomplish this pledge. At the time of our announcement at HIMSS 2013, our respective technical groups were excited, driven and likely a little apprehensive about what it would take to work across all these competing organizations. However, the teams rapidly came together as a cohesive unit, brainstorming and fleshing out core concepts and standards. We quickly committed to utilizing established standards wherever possible (e.g., [...]