The Department of Health and Humans Services has mapped out its strategic health IT plan for the next five years, focusing its efforts on improving individuals’ access to and usability of electronic health information.
Released last week, the 2020-2025 Federal Health IT Strategic Plan was developed by the HHS’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in collaboration with over 25 federal organizations. The ONC released a draft version of the plan in January and asked for public comment. While developing the final plan, the ONC took nearly 100 public comments into account.
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There are four basic goals outlined in the plan, underpinned by specific objectives.
1. Promote health and wellness. The HHS plans to focus on providing individuals access to health information in a way that empowers them. This includes providing people access to their data via secure mobile apps, patient portals and other technologies as well as improving health IT literacy by developing educational resources.
The goal is also tied to integrating health and human services data to help address social determinants of health at the individual and population levels. One strategy set forth by HHS for achieving this is standardizing social determinants and social service data and making it interoperable.
2. Enhance the delivery and experience of care. Health IT tools should be used to support high-quality patient care, HHS states in the plan. Strategies to achieve this goal include promoting data sharing through widely accepted standards and encouraging non-traditional care delivery facilitated via technology, like telehealth services and remote patient monitoring.
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In addition, HHS plans to reduce regulatory and administrative burden on providers by streamlining clinical documentation and encouraging use of automated tools.
3. Build a secure, data-driven ecosystem to accelerate research and innovation. Objectives designed to help achieve this goal include enabling individual- and population-level transfer of health data and supporting research and innovation using health IT. Among HHS’ many strategies are plans to allow individuals to provide data via apps and other health technology for research purposes.
Further, HHS wants to ensure that research conducted reflects the diversity of the country.
4. Connect healthcare with health data. HHS is focused on advancing health IT capabilities, and to achieve this end, it plans on reducing barriers to entry for technology developers and promoting the trustworthiness of health IT by enforcing information blocking, privacy and security laws when necessary.
Another objective tied to this goal is establishing expectations for data sharing, which HHS plans to do by developing educational resources for providers and getting rid of data sharing practices that are unnecessarily restrictive.
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