Federal Health IT Strategic Plan Open For Comment
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
The ONC five-year plan for 2015-2020 is designed to move beyond EHRs to telehealth and mobile health.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has released its 2015-2020 Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, which presents the federal government’s HIT priorities over the next five years, according to a press release. There is a 60 day public comment period on the draft plan, which was developed based on input from more than 35 federal agencies.
The ONC stated that the 28-page plan “represents a coordinated and focused effort to appropriately collect, share, and use interoperable health information to improve healthcare, individual, community and public health, and advance research across the federal government and in collaboration with private industry.”
“The 2015 Strategic Plan provides the federal government a strategy to move beyond health care to improve health, use health IT beyond EHRs, and use policy and incentive levers beyond the incentive programs,” Karen DeSalvo, M.D., national coordinator for health IT and acting assistant secretary for health explained in the release. “The success of this plan is also dependent upon insights from public and private stakeholders and we encourage their comments.”
“The current plan was written at the height of the work around HITECH, and a lot of our effort at that time appropriately was on thinking through how those levers – Meaningful Use (MU), some of the grant programs, the Affordable Care Act – and particularly health IT stand at improving care delivery,” Health Data Management quoted DeSalvo as saying. “Now is the time to expand beyond healthcare organizations, as they impact only about 10 to 20 percent of somebody’s health,” she added.
DeSalvo emphasized the federal government as a “purchaser, payer, provider, and regulator” of the healthcare industry can advance “health IT-ness well beyond the few levers” such as the MU currently under its control with other opportunities across the public sector. She also said the Federal HIT Strategic Plan is meant to set the “context and framing” for ONC’s interoperability roadmap – slated for public release in early 2015 – which will lay out how the federal government and private sector will approach sharing health information. “Interoperability is a crosscutting component of this plan, and implementation of the roadmap will be necessary to advance the plan’s goals,” argues the strategy document.
“The Federal Health IT Strategic Plan collectively represents specific goals and strategies for how interoperability will be leveraged to foster the technological advancement of health information exchange to improve quality of care,” said Gail Graham, deputy secretary for health informatics and analytics at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration, Office of Health Information, in the release.
ONC and the federal government wish to move beyond the creation of financial and regulatory incentives that encourage the use of health IT to the creation of a competitive and innovative marketplace.