CNSG Reports more Health IT News!

CNSG is keeping on the pulse of the new EMR (Electronic Medical Records) initiatives coming out of Federal Government. Here is a great article, courtesy of the Government Health IT newsletter (a HIMSS publication http://govhealthit.com/Home.aspx):

HHS Policy panel meets to set health IT priorities
By Mary Mosquera
May 11, 2009
Stimulus law dictates tight schedule to determine standards for meaningful use, certification and information exchange, Blumenthal says
A high-level committee advising the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT recommended ONC focus its priorities in order to meet the tight timetable for carrying out the terms of the economic stimulus law.
Members of the Health IT Policy Committee, in their first meeting since the panel was formed, agreed ONC should put the resolution of policies surrounding “meaningful use,” health IT certification and health information exchange standards at the top of its agenda.
“We have a lot of work to do in a short period of time,” said Dr. David Blumenthal, national health IT coordinator and the chairman of the committee. “We are charged with instructing what standards we would like them to focus on.”
The policy panel also recommended that the Health IT Standards Committee, a second key ONC advisory group, begin to determine the standards that will be required in those policy areas and how its work should be sequenced. The standards group will meet for the first time May 15.
The committees are on an aggressive schedule to determine policies and standards for rolling out a national health IT plan that was outlined and funded in the economic stimulus legislation.
“If you work back from that time frame, it gives us very little pause in order for designing policy to support the implementation of the meaningful use criteria,” Blumenthal said. “We have to parallel the process for a strategic plan along with getting started."
Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Health and Human Services Department would tie increased Medicare and Medicaid payments to physicians and hospitals based on their “meaningful use” of health IT starting in 2011.
HHS must define meaningful use and develop interim standards to support it in a rule-making process by the end of this calendar year, he said. “We are already behind in creating those standards,” he said.
The policy committee will add work groups to fill out details to each of the three focus areas, he said. For example, the certification group would take on policy challenges in health IT adoption, such as reviewing infrastructure and workforce issues. But some themes would overlap in all three.
“All of them will concern themselves with privacy and patient centered perspectives on health information technology,” Blumenthal said.
ONC must also release by May 18 its vision for creating a training system to help physicians and hospitals learn how to use electronic health records effectively, a critical component for any plan to achieve meaningful use, he said.
Dr. Paul Tang, chief medical officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and a member of the policy committee, said Blumenthal appreciates the sense of urgency that is needed to accomplish the provisions of the law.
“Getting a message out at least about direction is, I think, his intent,” he said. “Very quickly he wants to lay out the direction about how he plans to approach meaningful use and the whole idea of certification.”
The law mentions certification, but what to certify and how and where to set the bar is still “an open question,” he said.
The stimulus law called for the creation of the two policy and standards committees to help ONC pick the most effective ways to using the $2 billion allocated to drive the adoption of electronic health records.
The committees are made up of representatives from government, health care providers, insurers, technology vendors, researchers and consumer groups. “We are not so much people focusing on health care technology but people focusing on how to make our health system better,” Blumenthal said.
Two critical components of President Barack Obama’s health care agenda are to increase public access to health care insurance coverage and to improve the health system performance. “Those are completely and intimately interrelated because we cannot achieve our coverage goals unless we achieve our system performance goals,” Blumenthal said.
The short timelines and sense of urgency in health care reflect the administration’s urgency in its other economic challenges, Tang said. “In a sense, we are on the same par of crisis as the rest of the country from an economic point of view and a health status point of view,” he said.
In a related event the same day, the president met with healthcare industry organizations to discuss how to make the health system more efficient, Blumenthal noted.
About the Author
Mary Mosquera is senior editor for Government Health IT. She is based in Washington