Our coverage of National health IT coordinator Dr. Karen DeSalvo’s April 16 keynote session at HIMSS15 said that she remained “optimistic” about the future of health IT.
Friday, DeSalvo opened a blog post for policy journal Health Affairs, with these exact words: “I am optimistic about the bright future we have to leverage health information technology to enable better health for everyone in this country.”
The post, which Health Affairs said was based on DeSalvo’s HIMSS talk, spelled out a three-part agenda for realizing the promise of health IT through interoperable, secure health records:
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To get to interoperability as quickly and safely as possible we need to build upon the current infrastructure and to pursue three critical pathways:
- First, we need to standardize standards, including APIs, and implementation standards.
- Second, we need to have clarity about the trust environment — what are the shared expectations and actions around data security and privacy?
- And third, we need to incentivize—in a durable and sustainable way—interoperability and the appropriate uses of electronic health information — all with the goal to advance health care and health.
And now we must act on our roadmap, our plan. For the ONC’s part, we put out our first deliverable which was our Interoperability Standards Advisory. Clear expectations about what standards we should all use.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in January published a draft roadmap for achieving true interoperability by 2017. ONC followed up this month with an uncharacteristically harsh report on “information blocking” by certain, unnamed vendors.
That report “gives a clear definition of blocking and recommends actions in hand, gaps in authorities where we look forward to working with Congress on solutions,” DeSalvo wrote in Health Affairs.
Expect another report on the issue of trust, she added. “To define the trust environment, we are working with states on one of their top priorities: harmonizing privacy policy and regulations, and we have been working on defining the rules of the road for governance and how to hold people accountable to them.”
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DeSalvo also sounded an upbeat note on the recent pushback from Congress on the direction of Meaningful Use. “Congress is our partner; I am excited to see their interest in making sure that health data is available for consumers, and our doctors, when and where it matters most,” she said. However, the federal government is not the only plauer here.
“We intend to use all of the most impactful and appropriate tools in our toolbox and have called on the private sector and states to do the same,” wrote DeSalvo. “I am optimistic because I am seeing collaboration like never before from the private sector — look at the Argonauts—the coalition of technologists and developers who are collaborating in an unprecedented fashion—who are accelerating the maturation of FHIR, to see that we have a safe, but highly usable new technology that stands to transform the health IT ecosystem.”
FHIR, for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, is a new standard from Health Level Seven International that many policymakers are bullish on.
“HHS and the administration have laid out a framework to get to better care, smarter spending and healthier people—this delivery system reform initiative that I have the honor to co-lead on her behalf—is leveraging the three pillars of changing the way we pay for care, deliver care, and make information available to inform care and health,” DeSalvo continued.
“We know for a fact that unless we have the health information technology, including interoperability right, we will not bring payment reform or better care models like the medical home to scale.”
