A new collaboratory to coordinate clinical decision support efforts across the federal government held its first meeting this month, with 28 agency representatives participating.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and the Personalized Health Care Initiative — all in the Health and Human Services Department — hosted the organizational meeting.
The idea behind the new organization, which is an informal one for now, is to share expertise and capitalize on the work many agencies have accomplished in recent years, said Charles Friedman, deputy national coordinator for health IT. “There is a fair amount of collaboration going on already,” he said, but more consistency would help keep clinical decision support moving forward.
The collaboratory is one of several recent policy developments in clinical decision support, which uses reminders, alerts and other technological aids to help medical providers and their patients make decision.
Also this month, AHRQ awarded two contracts totaling $5 million to prominent health institutions to develop, adopt, implement and evaluate best practices in clinical decision support.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and the Yale University School of Medicine in Connecticut will define effective clinical decision support tools and incorporate them into two commercial electronic medical record systems. They will then evaluate how doctors and nurses use the tools and assess the benefits and drawbacks for providers and patients.
In another development, American Health Information Community workgroups are preparing clinical decision support recommendations for the organization, which is HHS’ high-level health IT advisory panel.
Draft recommendations, which are likely to be revised before the organization’s April meeting, include:
In accordance with national priorities for improving health care quality, federal agencies, including the Clinical Decision Support Collaboratory, should identify priorities for federally funded clinical decision support activities and create a plan for evaluating their effectiveness.
AHRQ should support research into best practices for clinical decision support in electronic health record and personal health record systems. It should also support research into how clinical decision support can help patients with chronic diseases manage their own care.
HHS should support development of a minimum set of personal patient data, such as demographic information and clinical history, that would contribute to individualized care. Once the dataset has been identified, the Healthcare IT Standards Panel should develop interoperability standards for EHRs and PHRs.
Model clinical decision support knowledge repositories should be aligned with the quality reporting and pay-for-performance initiatives of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
An ad hoc planning group composed of representatives of six AHIC workgroups developed the recommendations. The group is led by John Glaser, co-chairman of AHIC’s Personalized Healthcare Workgroup and vice president and chief information officer at Partners HealthCare System in Boston.
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.
