By David McCallie – I have been honored to have served on the HIT Standards Committee from its beginning in 2009. As I reach my term limits, I have reflected on what we have all learned over the past six years of helping to define the standards for the certified EHR technology that lies behind the Meaningful Use program.
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By John Halamka MD – In my previous writing, I’ve suggested that the federal government co-opted our Clinical IT agenda over the past three years with Meaningful Use Stage 2, ICD-10, the HIPAA Omnibus Rule, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
By John Halamka MD – The use of the term interoperability is being tossed around in ways that makes it seem like the test for obscenity used by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1964.
By John Halamka MD – Every technology has an adoption journey. The classic Gartner hype curve travels from a Technology Trigger to the Peak of Inflated Expectations followed by the Trough of Disillusionment. It often takes years before organizations reach the Slope of Enlightenment and finally achieve a Plateau of Productivity.
By John Halamka MD – The May 2015 HIT Standards Committee focused on an in depth review of the ONC NPRM, with the goal of providing guidance to ONC by June as to which standards should be included in final rule, which should not be included, and which should be identified as directionally appropriate for inclusion in future regulation.
John Halamka MD – I’m in Washington today for the HIT Standards Committee and I will post the usual summary of the meeting this evening. However, I wanted to post a morning preview of the opening comments I’ll make a the meeting. We are in a time of great turmoil in healthcare IT policy making.
By John Halamka MD – The first part of this week I have been in China – Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Xuzhou as part of a Harvard Medical School program to help the Chinese create a learning healthcare system while they build 1000 new hospitals and train 300,000 new primary care givers.
By John Halamka – The April 2015 HITSC meeting focused on the Certification Rule NPRM and a comprehensive review of the Federal Interoperability Roadmap. I suggested that a guiding principle for the committee’s work is to emphasize the enablers in the proposals while reducing those aspects that create substantial burden/slow innovation. As a federal advisory committee our job is to temper regulatory ambition with operational reality.
The HIMSS 2015 conference is officially over. It was a week of more than any one person could take in. It is always good to check in with our regular contributors and industry to see what they had to say about HIMSS this year.