A team of two nonprofit organizations has won a grant to privatize the American Health Information Community, the high-level health information technology advisory committee at the Department of Health and Human Services.
LMI Consulting, of McLean, Va., and the Brookings Institution, of Washington, are the leaders of the winning team, announced today at the AHIC meeting at HHS headquarters.
“Announcing this award today is a very important step in securing all the work we have done,” said HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, who created AHIC and then decided it would thrive in years to come outside the federal government.
Dr. Robert Kolodner, the national coordinator for health IT, said the LMI-Brookings team demonstrated that it already has involved a wide range of health IT stakeholders in its application for the grant.
He told Government Health IT the grant’s value is $5 million, of which $2 million will go to the LMI-Brookings team for its work, and $3 million will be start-up funding for the newly private organization.
Leavitt has dubbed the privatized organization AHIC 2.0. The LMI-Brookings team has until the end of 2008 to get it up and running.
Not coincidentally, the end of this year marks, for practical purposes, the end of the Bush administration. Leavitt wants AHIC to live on past the end of his term at HHS and, he said today, increase the speed and volume of its work.
LMI and Brookings representatives at the AHIC meeting declined to say anything about their plans, saying they would make an announcement soon. However, Kolodner said LMI would administer the grant money, and Brookings’ Engelberg Center for Healthcare Reform would handle some of the health policy-related work.
Leavitt has said AHIC 2.0 will get financial support from the federal government in addition to other stakeholders. He discussed a model in which organizations would pay dues to belong to the new organization and have a voice in its decisions.
AHIC has been setting priorities for the standards harmonization work being done by the Health IT Standards Panel and has been a forum for reaching consensus among sometimes conflicting interests. Its members represent doctors, hospitals, health plans, federal agencies that deliver and pay for health services, consumers, states, and other interests.
Leavitt said he expects AHIC to continue working at top speed to advance health IT. “I want to have acceleration into that handoff” at the end of the year, he said.
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.
