The House/Senate conference committee appointed to reconcile conflicting versions of the appropriations bills for the Health and Human Services Department has compromised on nearly $66.2 million in funding for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) this fiscal year.
The House is likely to approve the compromise bill later today and the Senate later this week. President Bush has threatened to veto it because overall HHS spending would exceed his budget request by billions of dollars. But Congress has packaged the HHS appropriations bill with the primary Defense Department appropriations bill, making it harder for the president to carry out the veto threat.
The House had approved $61.3 million in funding for ONC while the Senate had approved $71 million. The compromise amount falls far short of the $117.9 million President Bush requested in his budget for this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.
However, the $66.2 million represents an increase over the $61.3 million appropriated for ONC in fiscal 2007.
The compromise bill will apparently omit language the House had approved criticizing ONC. The House Appropriations Committee said in its report on the bill that it did not increase spending on health IT because of concerns that ONC “has yet to develop a detailed and integrated implementation plan for achieving the health information technology program’s strategic goals” as recommended by the Government Accountability Office. The committee asked HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt to provide a strategic plan by March 1, 2008.
In its report, the committee also asked HHS to develop a “privacy and security framework that will establish trust among consumers and users of electronic personal health information and will govern all efforts to advance electronic health information exchange.” The committee specified elements it wants to see in the framework, such as allowing individuals to have a say in who accesses their information and how it is used.
The national coordinator for health IT, Dr. Robert Kolodner, has said his office is working on a privacy and security framework that will be ready next spring.
Although the new fiscal year has been under way for a month, Congress has yet to approve any appropriations bills. Instead, agencies are operating on continuing resolutions that generally maintain spending at the previous year’s levels.
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.
