Three Workgroups Prepare for August 20, 2009 HIT Standards Meeting
John Halamka, on his blog Life as a Healthcare CIO, reported July 29, 2009, on the progress of three working groups since the July 21, 2009 meeting of HIT Standards Committee as they prepare for August 20, 2009 meeting: Privacy and Security, Clinical Quality, and Clinical Operations. Groups are fine-tuning standards, partially in response to comments. On Security and Privacy, it appears that all health information transactions between organizations will need to be encrypted and that both SOAP and REST approaches to data exchange will be used depending on the specific transactions. On Clinical Quality, discussion is how to deal with removing certain patients from a specified field (exclusionary data) in light of inability of current EHR systems to handle. Clinical Operations is dealing with exchange of information where different vocabularies are being used.