The U.S. Health and Human Services Department (HHS) Monday announced new efforts to tackle one of the most vexing problems facing the creation of a national IT infrastructure for exchanging health data: the lack of interoperability among current IT investments.
HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt announced plans to work with hospitals, physicians" practices, insurance companies and vendors to forge interoperability standards through a new private-public collaboration called the American Health Information Community. AHIC, comprised of 17 members from the government and private sector, will make recommendations to HHS on how to ensure electronic medical records are interoperable while protecting the privacy and security of patient data.
In addition, Leavitt announced that his office tomorrow would release four requests for proposals for contracts to create processes for data standards, product certification, privacy and security, and the architecture for an Internet-based, nationwide health information exchange.
Leavitt, in a speech here at the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society National IT Summit, said the new initiatives are designed to ease the current interoperability problems found in the IT investments made today by hospitals, doctors and other health care IT users.
AHIC "will unify behind a common framework for achieving interoperability," he said. Vendors "are competing on the basis of their platforms. Our objective is to get people adding value on the basis of interoperability. We"re going to end up with a standard ... that is open and people can develop to it."
Once AHIC -- which Leavitt will chair -- develops the interoperability and certification standards, they will be submitted to the Commerce Department"s National Institute of Standards and Technology to be used as guidance for federal agencies buying health care IT products.
"This brings together an enormous amount of purchasing power behind these changes," according to Leavitt.
Putting the standards in place for the federal government -- which pays for more than one-third of all health care costs in the U.S. -- will prompt participation among large private-sector health care payers and providers and "provide the sense of certainty that is necessary" for the standards to be widely adopted, he said. HHS will adopt the standards and data sharing processes for Internet-based applications to help federal programs like Medicaid and Medicare support the use of electronic medical records.
AHIC will be chartered to operate for two years, with an option to extend its life for up to three more years. HHS envisions AHIC being succeeded within five years by a private-sector health information community initiative that will set additional needed standards and certify health IT products.
AHIC will have five specific tasks:
- Recommend ways to protect privacy and security.
- Identify and recommend ways to prioritize health IT projects that provide consumers with immediate benefits such as systems to ensure drug safety and monitor for bioterrorism attacks.
- Recommend a nationwide architecture that uses the Internet to share health information.
- Recommend processes for creating private-sector standards and product certification.
- Recommend how AHIC can be succeeded by a private-sector health information community.