Standard for Standards: Keep them simple; start them early
ePrescribing, Lab, Admin, Quality: Implementation Workgroup
John Halamka on Implementation Workgroup Testimony–Oct 29, 2009
In his Oct 30, 2009 post on Life as a Healthcare CIO, John Halamka summarizes the HIT Standards Committee Implementation Workgroup testimony. As someone fortunate to have attended the workgroup session in Washington, DC, your e-Healthcare Marketing blogger was in awe of the testimony about non-healthcare standards which described development of standards for XML, Property & Casualty Insurance data, and the automotive industry, which when broken down to their basic development issues seemed awfully similar to healthcare data exchange issues.
John Halamka on “What is a Standard” on ONC’s FACA Blog
In a parallel post on Oct 30, 2009 on ONC’s FACA Blog, Halamka describes the development of standards by the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Committee (Panel, turned into the HITSP acronym).
Feds urged to set simple, expandable HIE standards
“Technology executives from across the business world told a federal health IT advisory group yesterday it should establish simple but expandable health information exchange standards or risk overwhelming healthcare practitioners.”Mary Mosquera reported on October 30, 2009 in Government Health IT,
Panel seeks Rx for secure health data exchange
Alice Lipowicz reported in FederalComputerWeek on Oct 29, 2009, “Changing technology is easy; changing workflows is hard,” said Rich Warren, chief information officer of Allegiance Health community hospital. “Adoption is all about workflow, behavior modification and perceived value.”
eClinicalWorks CEO describes needs of small practices
One of the key points in the in the Oct 29, 2009 Implementation Workgroup testimony made by several people was the need for standards to be accessible and usable by the smallest enterprises, which in the case of healthcare means small physician practices. In addition to the two physicians who testified, Louis Spikol, MD, of Allentown, PA, and Floyd “Tripp” Bradd, MD, Front Royal, VA, no one was in a better position among the witnesses to talk about small practice implementation than Girsih Kumar Navani, CEO, whose eClinical Works has focused on setting up thousands of EHRs in physician offices, and worked with several community initiatives, including New York City and Massachusetts ventures.
Navani described the need for vocabulary standards–LINC, CPT, ICD, SNOMED, NDC–”What we need is a most commonly used and physician friendly list,” for use in EHRs. With regard to governance for interoperability Navani said “In community projects where we have been most successful and implemented ambulatory practice to practice sharing of patient records, hospital system interoperability, there has been a strong community governance model and value proposition for the small provider practice.”
EHR Firms: Go with Existing Standards
Joseph Goedert, reported in HealthData Management on Oct 29, 2009, “A coalition of electronic health records vendors is urging the HIT Standards Committee to focus its efforts on achieving implementation of data standards that the committee already has recommended to federal officials, rather than reopening decisions already made.”
HIMSS EHRA Written Testimony for Oct 29, 2009 Implementation Workgroup (pdf)
For most of the testimony documents at the Oct 29, 2009 Implementation Workgroup meeting, go to this earlier post on e-Healthcare Marketing.
