Federal HIT Strategic Plan To Look Beyond MU
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
DeSalvo looks to refresh HIT strategies for promoting interoperability.
Government Health IT writes, “Calling it a ‘changing of the horizon,’ national coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, said that her office is working to refresh the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan.” DeSalvo made her remarks at the AHIMA 2014 conference in San Diego.
HealthData Management quotes DeSalvo as saying, “That plan is one of our responsibilities laid out in the HITECH Act. The last one was developed in 2011. As you can imagine, it was more focused on the HITECH-era work of meaningful use. With our federal partners, we have been working together for the last few months to think about setting new priorities for the next five years for this country.”
The 2011-2015 Federal Health IT Strategic Plan was designed to accelerate the adoption of EHRs and to facilitate information exchange to support meaningful use. However, DeSalvo described the near-term healthcare environment as a “world where there’s going to be new data coming in, new devices, new demands, and new needs.”
DeSalvo announced the reboot of the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan will be available for public comment over the winter and encouraged all industry stakeholders to provide feedback. Although DeSalvo was frank about the fact that the industry has no the framework for the protection of consumer privacy in the face of a flood of new data sources, she asserted that the goal of the plan is to first connect the flow of information within the healthcare system, then pull in other data sources.
DeSalvo also discussed the evolution of Meaningful Use Stage 3 requirements, emphasizing that that the program should meet the policy goals of advancement without "crushing medicine." As good as the meaningful use program is, she said, it’s “necessary but not sufficient,” referencing the fact that there are providers in the behavioral health, long-term and post-acute care settings that are not eligible for MU but which are “critically important for the care, quality and health outcomes of our people.”
There are other opportunities for advancing interoperability that “go well beyond meaningful use,” DeSalvo argued. “We want to really understand how human and social services and other supports in the community space can be brought to bear to really advance health for everyone in this country.”
DeSalvo also touched briefly on the agency's recently-announced plans to collaborate with the US Postal Service to develop health record interoperability tools.
"They have hundreds of thousands of employees for whom they are making a personal health record and a portal so they can access their health information," DeSalvo said in a discussion panel. "They also have a potential platform to create a way that every American has an identifier, like an address they registered online."
“It’s an opportunity to look at HIT beyond the EHR and policy levers beyond meaningful use,” DeSalvo said of the forthcoming plan.