March 2016 Joint HIT Policy and Standards Committee
In the proud tradition of John Halamka, I’d like to offer a public service by publishing brief summaries of the deliberations of the HIT Standards Committee.
Today’s meeting was a Joint meeting of the HIT Policy Committee and the HIT Standards Committee. These joint meetings are important to ensure better coordination between policy goals and guidelines and technology and infrastructure enablement. In Health IT, policy and technology are clearly joined at the hip, and it is good that our committee deliberations reflect that ligature.
The meeting opened by welcoming Dr. Vindell Washington as ONC Principal Deputy in his first official capacity at the FACA meetings, and by welcoming Kathy Blake in her first meeting as HITPC Co-Chair. We also welcomed two new members to the HITSC: Dr. Dale Nordenberg representing privacy and security, and Dr. Kevin Johnson, representing the research community.
The first presentation was by Jon White and Leslie Kelly Hall, updating the committees on the Precision Medicine Task Force, by outlining the charge for the next set of work for the Task Force. Both Co-Chairs commented on the White House meeting on Precision Medicine at which the President demonstrated his passion and deep interest in advancing the next generation of cures. (The White House co-incidently posted an update on the Precision Medicine today as well). Committee members commented that it would be ideal for participants to access and direct their records to the PMI cohort directly; it was noted that this is the exact goal of the Sync for Science pilot work.
Steve Posnack then updated the committees on the evolution of ONC’s approach to standards and technology partnership. He highlighted both the new Interoperability Proving Ground and the new, not-as-yet-official, Beta CHPL. Elise Anthony briefed the committees on policy initiatives, including revising ONC model privacy notices to a new consumer device and app-centered world, and the NPRM on Enhanced Oversight (Direct Review), which gives ONC new tools to provide oversight for Health IT in the wild. Elise encouraged the community to review and comment on the proposed rule, ideally using the public comment template.
Finally, Meg Marshall and Josh Mandel updated the committees on the API Task Force. They reviewed the charge, updated us on key findings from the public hearing, and presented their workplan going forward. The key commentary from committee members centered on how to balance the needs of consumers to use devices and applications of their choosing to better manage their health, and the needs of providers and organizations to appropriately guide patients to secure and medically validated applications and protect themselves from liability when and if individuals choose apps that may not behave appropriately. This important work occurs in the context of helpful HHS OCR guidance on health apps and consumer access.
The updates highlighted that we are truly entering a post-meaningful use era, in which more liquid data is usable by researchers and individuals in novel and exciting ways.
