phenomenalplace

The following showed up in my inbox this morning. In general, I think this is great policy advice, especially the section on Agency Responsibilities starting at the bottom of page 3. What I'd liked to emphasize is this statement found on the middle of page 2: To accomplish these objectives, the Federal Government, as directed by Congress, is taking a convening role to accelerate standards development, by working closely with domestic and international private sector standards organizations. I work closely with SDOs, and I know what it means to do so.  I cannot give the Federal Government high marks here, although I have to admit that they've gotten better over the last year.  If they mean to sustain the good work going on in the S&I Framework activities, they'll have to do better.   The S&I  contracts will end, and that means someone will have to maintain the outputs. I hope we won't have another situation like the one where HITSP wound up orphaning documen...

Rene Spronk had a great post on the HL7 Affiliate Life Cycle a few weeks back.  Yesterday Catherine Chronaki displayed a simple slide based on that model at the HL7 Working Group meeting.  While Rene talks about it from an HL7 Perspective, I think about it from a national perspective.  There are essentially five levels in Rene's model: Raising Awareness Creating Consensus Based Localization Paid Development Official Endorsement Standards Collaborative So far, only Canada is at level 5.  The US through Meaningful Use is sort of at level 4 for endorsement of HL7 standards, and the ONC S&I Framework is certainly a level 2 activity, if not officially acting as an HL7 Affiliate. The S&I Framework contracts (there are at least 10) will eventually end.  There are a lot of activities which have produced outputs that still need maintenance (e.g., the Clinical Element Data Dictionary).  One of the tasks for the S&I Framework is to establish a long term...

We have reached a fulcrum point in the history of health care in our country. The announcement on Tuesday of the final rule establishing Medicare and Medicaid incentive programs for the meaningful use of electronic health records (EHR) creates a framework for change that will have reverberations throughout the health care industry. An important companion rule (pdf) was also released that establishes standards, specifications and certification criteria for EHRs. David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health information technology at Health and Human Services (HHS), and Marilyn Tavenner, principal deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), published an overview of the meaningful use rule in the the New England Journal of Medicine . John D. Halamka, of both Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, wrote an excellent analysis of the final standards rule on his blog . I expect in the coming months there will be a great de...

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) issued a final rule defining meaningful use requirements to qualify for incentive payments under the HITECH portion of the ARRA. The final rule for meaningful use is embedded below (it is temporarily available at the Public Inspection Desk , but this link will expire after the rule is actually published) and it is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register July, 28 2010. The rule definitively outlines all the specifics of Stage 1 meaningful use and clinical quality measure reporting to receive the incentive payments in 2011 and 2012. The final rule builds on the notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) released December 30, 2009. The definition of meaningful use attempts to harmonize criteria across other CMS programs as much as possible and coordinate with quality initiatives. It also is closely linked to the certification standards criteria in development by the Office of the National Coordin...