On January 20^th, the HIT Standards Committee held its January meeting in Washington, DC. Jonathan Perlin, the Chair of the HIT Standards Committee, initiated the meeting with a quote from Dr. David Blumenthal’s recent New England Journal of Medicine article, “Information is the lifeblood of modern medicine. Health information technology is destined to be its circulatory system.” This quote set the tone for the rest of the day, in which committee members examined how standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria — as seen in the recently released Interim Final Rule (IFR) and meaningful use Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) – can transform healthcare.

To begin, Doug Fridsma and Jodi Daniels of ONC reviewed the IFR on the initial set of standards, implementation specifications and certification criteria. They reviewed the principles that guide certification criteria – supporting meaningful use, fostering innovation, and testing objectively – as well as the principles that guide standards – providing progressive capacity, securing transport, defining adoption terminologies, and allowing for strong security functionality.

Karen Trudel, from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, provided an overview of the NPRM and its key components: definitions of meaningful use and hospital-based eligible professionals, Medicare FFS and Advantage EHR Incentive Programs, Medicaid’s EHR Incentive Programs and the Collection of Information Analysis Act. Ms. Trudel reminded attendees to comment on the IFR and the NPRM by the end of the public comment period on March 15, 2010 at regulations.gov using the links below:

• IFR: Health Information Technology: Initial Set of Standards, Implementation
• NPRM: Medicare and Medicaid Programs; Electronic Health Record Incentive Program

Jamie Ferguson and John Halamka gave updates from the Clinical Operations Workgroup, highlighting the next steps for the next six months – providing further recommendations on content exchange, vocabulary and code set standards – and the next six weeks – providing comments on selected key points of content exchange and vocabulary in the IFR. The agenda and the presentation materials from the January HIT Standards Committee Meeting are available on the HIT Standards Committee Web page.

Tags: FACA, HIT Standards Committee, Meeting Summary

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