2-17 HIT Policy Committee

The HIT Policy Committee gathered for its second meeting of the year on February 17^th in Washington, DC. The majority of the meeting time was dedicated to discussing recommendations of the Meaningful Use Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) and Standards and Certification Interim Final Rule (IFR). Four Committee workgroups presented recommendations for the existing criteria, to better enable the electronic health records (EHR) incentive program to achieve its objectives and facilitate progress toward the ultimate goal of improving health and health care of all Americans.
The Meaningful Use Workgroup began by laying out a series of 12 recommendations, including proposals to make progress note documentation a part of the Stage 1 meaningful use definition and to allow eligible providers a certain degree of flexibility in meeting the meaningful use criteria. Next, the Adoption/Certification Workgroup presented comments on eligible provider reporting metrics and interoperability standards. Both the Adoption/Certification and the Health Information Exchange workgroups put forward recommendations regarding the laboratory portions of the NPRM and IFR. Finally, the Privacy and Security Policy Workgroup proposed ways to strengthen existing meaningful use and certification criteria relevant to privacy and security, as well as concerns and future policy and standards priorities.
Following dialogue about the NPRM and IFR, the HIT Policy Committee shifted attention to its effort in creating a set of recommendations for the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). The NHIN Workgroup focused the meeting’s discussion on the role of enabling organizations and associated functions and services, encompassing a minimal core set of services and functions needed to support standards-based interoperability along with further services to support additional interoperability at scale.
The last segment of the meeting was devoted to reviewing the framework for the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan. The Strategic Planning Workgroup outlined the framework’s vision and four key themes, which center around meaningful use, development and support of a policy and technical infrastructure, incorporation of privacy and security solutions into every phase of health IT adoption and use, and transformation of the current healthcare delivery system into a learning health system.

The meeting materials from the meeting are below. Here is the audio:

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• Agenda
• Meaningful Use Workgroup: Comments & Discussion on the NPRM
  
  
  • NPRM Recommendations 
• Adoption/Certification Workgroup: Comments & Discussion on the NPRM and IFR on Certification Criteria 
• Information Exchange Workgroup: Comments & Discussion on Health Information Exchange in the NPRM 
• Privacy & Security Policy Workgroup: Comments & Discussion on the Privacy & Security Objective in the NPRM 
• NHIN Workgroup Recommendations
• Update: Strategic Plan Workgroup

via healthit.hhs.gov