With a mere 461 days until the 2016 election, the partisan divide is as acute as ever, but here’s a hopeful sign that Washington occasionally works: Dr. Karen DeSalvo will get a hearing this week on her nomination to be assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services. It only took three months for the Senate to make it happen.
As Politico first reported, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee has scheduled a hearing on the nomination for its Thursday session.
DeSalvo, the head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology since January 2014, has also served as acting assistant secretary since October 2015. President Obama nominated her in May to take the assistant secretary’s job on a permanent basis. If confirmed, DeSalvo would step down as national coordinator; none of her four ONC predecessors served for less than two years.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
The potential change comes as HHS is preparing modifications to Stage 2 Meaningful Use as well as the final rule for Stage 3. The department is taking a lot of heat for both.
On Friday, 18 entities, including health IT vendors, industry groups and provider-side organizations, sent HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell a letter urging the department to finalize the Stage 2 changes as soon as possible in order to give hospitals and physician practices enough time to achieve Meaningful Use in 2015. “If providers do not receive the final rule shortly, it will be very difficult to make workflow adjustments in a timely manner to meet programmatic deadlines and facilitate Meaningful Use tracking and reporting,” the letter said.
While Meaningful Use regulations technically come out of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, ONC has a central role in shaping federal health IT policy.
This week’s scheduled hearing, of course, is only the first step in DeSalvo’s confirmation process. The HELP Committee would then have to vote to move the nomination to the full Senate, and then Senate leadership would have to schedule a vote.
Did we mention that Congress takes a month-long recess starting Saturday?
