Chopra seeks outside advice on health IT standards

The Health IT Standards Committee today said today it would bring together experts from outside the healthcare field to share ideas about best ways to apply new workflow and information sharing standards across organizations.

Aneesh Chopra, the White House’s chief technology officer and chairman of the panel’s newly formed standards implementation group, said he wants to mine the lessons of other industries in using information handling standards successfully and then apply them broadly to healthcare.

“There is an interest in how other industries have adopted standards, and I think we’re going to take that feedback to heart,” Chopra said after the meeting. The panel will host a hearing on Oct. 29 to share best practices, Chopra said.

Additionally, Chopra will open a two-week online forum to seek feedback from a wider audience on a series of structured questions and information posts on standards usage. The implementation workgroup will report on its findings at the next standards committee meeting Nov. 19 

Dr. David Blumenthal, the national health IT coordinator, cautioned against confusing the adoption of standards with the adoption of electronic health record technologies.

“This is not about the adoption of technology but the adoption of standards,” he said. Health IT vendors will be able to solve most of the technology problems, he said.

Standards are at the heart of healthcare reform, Blumenthal noted, as reform will depend on standards and infrastructure being available to exchange health information anytime.

“Congress might not know it or realize it, but you are at the center of their effort to improve the healthcare system,” Blumenthal said in praising the standards committee’s work.

Blumenthal also said the Nationwide Health Information Network project, a public-private sector project that has been in progress for years, is essentially a set of standards.

“The goal has always been not to develop a thing or a network that is closed or a physical representation of a network, but to create a resource in the form of protocols, standards and specifications that are available in the public domain, he said.

“They are available to anyone who wishes to use the Internet to exchange information in a private and secure and effective way.”

Blumenthal said his office has also been considering how to accelerate the availability of the standards, protocols and specifications that comprise the NHIN as well as how to provide consumers and small practices access to the NHIN toolset.

“We think [that] is a laudatory goal just as we think that individual physicians and small physician groups should” have access. Blumenthal said. “This is a public resource whose broadest use is our goal.”

In other areas, the Committee’s clinical quality workgroup said it would create a sub-group to focus on gaps in the transition of  vocabulary standards along the health IT adoption path.

For instance, providers will have to migrate from using ICD-9 to ICD-10 to SNOMED CT by 2015 to record physician’s clinical observations in an electronic health record.

“We need to enable that conversion to the adoption process, and that’s where these gaps are,” said Jamie Ferguson, co-chairman of the work group and executive director of Kaiser Permanente’s health IT strategy and policy.