The January HIT Standards Committee meeting

The January HIT Standards Committee began with passionate remarks from Farzad Mostashari, emphasizing the need to maintain momentum as the country evolves from Stage 1 to Stage 2, from data capture and sharing to advanced clinical processes.   In some ways, the press and policymakers have attention deficit disorder, asking for the improved outcomes of Stage 3 before the foundation of Stage 1 and 2 is widely implemented.    All members of the Standards Committee are committed to continuous forward progress.

Jodi Daniel presented the HIT Policy Committee preliminary 2013 work plan which includes specific tasks in 5 areas

*Measuring clinical quality
*Health Information Exchange
*Safety
*Privacy
*Managing and using patient data
*Accountable Care

Based on this plan, the Policy Committee's  request for comments, input from HIT Standards Committee members, ONC's  Meaningful Use Stage 3 standards gap analysis, and feedback from workgroup chairs, we assembled a draft of priority areas which will be used to create a standards work plan for FY13 and beyond 

There are five general categories of work, each with 5 themes

* Quality and Safety
* Health information Exchange
* Consumer
* ACO/Population Health/Care Management
* Privacy/Security

Doug Fridsma mapped the 25 elements on the Standards Committee priority themes to existing ONC efforts.   As a next step, Doug will turn the priorities into a structured work plan, balancing the need for new standards, the timeframes in which their are needed and the amount of work required given the existing maturity of the standards.   This work plan will be presented at the February meeting.

Next, we reviewed the deliberations of the Standards Committee workgroups which reviewed the Policy Committee's request for comment.    Although detailed comments were provided on every line item, the workgroup chairs presented a high level overview of their recommendations and we discussed their recommendations.   I will present the responses to the policy committee on February 6.

Doug Fridsma and Jodi Daniel offered ONC updates including the status of S&I framework projects some of which are transitioning to public private partnerships.

Finally, Becky Kush from CDISC presented an overview of the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) curated standards.

The day's discussion was a confluence of work priorities some which were reactive to policy committee requests and some of which were proactive to enable future policy goals.

I look forward to the February meeting at which we'll reaffirm the phasing of our FY13 projects, finishing works in progress and taking on new priority efforts.