By John Halamka, MD
Twitter: @jhalamka
The September 2015 HIT Standards Committee was notable for the naming of new members and for the incorporation of the NwHIN Power Team (Dixie Baker) Standards Maturity model in all of ONC’s planning.
Ten members of the committee reached their term limit in June. New confirmed members announced are:
- Jitin Asnaani, Technical Expertise – Information Exchange
- Josh Mandel, Provider Representative
- Rich Elmore, Technical Vendor Representative
- Angela Kennedy, Consumer/Patient Representative
- Patty Sengstack, Provider Representative
Three more will be announced this Fall and the final two will be named in early 2016.
Jon White and Leslie Kelly Hall presented the Precision Medicine Task Force Recommendations.
As you can see in the presentation, they divided up the required standards into green, yellow, red – ready for use, promising for use, and more work to be done. The committee offered a few recommendations i.e. move genomics standards from green to yellow, move consent standards from red to yellow, and clarify the interoperability standards advisory examples. The committee adopted the recommendations as revised. As mentioned above, the entire classification effort was guided by the Standards Maturity Model published in JAMIA.
Next we heard from Steve Posnack, who presented the rubric/framework for sub regulatory standards guidance i.e. what standards are appropriate for what use case and what is their level of maturity? Specific scores (bubbles) are given to the adoption of every standard, making it very easy for developers to identify the right standard (or promising standard) to incorporate into their products.
Our October 6 meeting will be a joint meeting of the HIT Policy Committee and Standards Committee. I imagine we’ll discuss the recently released Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2015-2020. Still no word on the timing of Meaningful Use Stage 2 revisions and Meaningful Use Stage 3.
John D. Halamka, MD, MS, is Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Chairman of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network (NEHEN), Co-Chair of the HIT Standards Committee, a full Professor at Harvard Medical School, and a practicing Emergency Physician. This article was originally published in his blog Life as a Healthcare CIO and is reprinted here with permission.