The National Alliance for Health Information Technology will launch next week a project to help eliminate confusion in the national discussion about health IT adoption by helping define health IT’s most commonly used – and misused – terms.
The industry-led Alliance is shepherding a five-month long project to define, vet and deliver to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONCHIT) consensus definitions for electronic health record (EHR), electronic medical record (EMR), personal health record (PHR), health information exchange (HIE) and regional health information organization (RHIO).
Jane Horowitz, the Alliance's vice president and chief marketing officer, said the business case for the project focuses on the need for common definitions for the terms in contractual agreements, in helping advance health IT adoption, and to engage consumers in that effort.
“The question is, are we really speaking the same language and using the same terminology,” she said. “But then it becomes how do you start talking to consumers in a way they can understand what we’re trying to do in terms of the whole national structure of health IT.”
ONCHIT, which is underwriting the project, said the lack of precision in the common language of health IT is an obstacle to its adoption. "A plethora of competing and confusing definitions, with terms often used interchangeably, is impeding progress in health information technology," said Dr. Karen Bell, who leads ONCHIT’s Office of Health IT Adoption.
The alliance has asked for suggested definitions for the terms by Nov. 2. That starts a months-long process during which the alliance will research all known definitions of the terms and run a series of public forums to gather input. The alliance wants submissions for work-group candidates by Nov. 16th. The public forums will be held in December, January and February 2008 in Los Angeles, Washington and Houston.
The definitions will be delivered to health IT and the American Health Information Community by the end of March 2008, Horowitz said.
The project does not aim to define the terms for use in technical standards but instead wants to create conventions that would be relevant in the clinical and practice communities, Horowitz said. In doing so, it will consult existing technical language describing the terms. That research and recommended definitions it receives from industry will then be vetted through the work groups and public forums.
The alliance is doing the work under a $500,000 contract ONCHIT has with BearingPoint, a program management and contract logistical support firm.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
