HIMSS News
Healthcare Reform Update: NHIN and Comparative Effectiveness Research are Focus of the Week
July 2, 2009
Congressional Affairs
The House and Senate are in Recess this week, as Representatives and Senators celebrate the 4th of July holiday in their home states. We anticipate a return to full activity on healthcare reform starting July 6.
Federal Affairs
Another busy week for federal agencies focused on meeting the requirements in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) is said to have received nearly 1,000 comments on the draft definition of Meaningful Use. HIMSS comments coalesced around three categories: Implementation Timeline & Structure, Adoption Sequence, and Workforce. ONC staff members are expected to work with the HIT Policy Committee on refining the draft definition in time for the HIT Policy Committee to present their recommendations to Dr. David Blumenthal, National Coordinator for Health IT, at the Committee’s July 16th meeting in Washington, DC.
ONC also conducted a NHIN CONNECT Seminar earlier this week that was well received by the nearly 1,100 participants over the two-day event. CONNECT is a software gateway built by more than 20 federal agencies to help them build health information exchanges and securely share data among themselves and with other levels of government and the private sector. It was built in open source and was released to the public in April for use by any organization. The solution addresses the need of organizations to share health data in compliance with Nationwide Health Information Network standards and agreements. The conference focused on the ways CONNECT is being used today, as well as the user community being built around the solution to truly bring CONNECT into the public domain.
The full conference agenda and many of the presentations are already available for review. The sessions provided greater insight into the direction for the Nationwide Health Information Network, as well as practical information on getting involved in the open sourced software. Of particular note is the seamless coordination that is evident between Dr. Blumenthal and Mr. Aneesh Chopra, the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, as they move ahead to incorporate health IT initiatives into the overall Obama Administration technology agenda. Both recognize health IT and technology are enablers to achieving greater efficiency and effectiveness in government that will aid the U.S. economy and global competitiveness. As part of his remarks, Mr. Chopra emphasized the importance of open collaboration within government and between government and industry to ensure innovation that will benefit healthcare delivery.
The philosophy was echoed by Mr. W. Scott Gould, deputy secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, in his comments to open the second day of the seminar. Deputy Secretary Gould talked about activities between Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense, and emphasized how activities like NHIN CONNECT can support cross-agency activities to reduce the number of “one at a time” solutions between federal agencies that take more time to develop.
In other ARRA-related activities, the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness, a cross-agency collaborative established by President Obama to make recommendations for the allocation of $400 million of ARRA funding for comparative effectiveness research (CER), released their findings in a report to the President and Congress on June 29. Federal Comparative Effectiveness Research is designed to compare medical treatments and strategies to improve healthcare quality and cost. The report, which will help to inform Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius' submission of an operational plan for the combined $1.1 billion allocated for patient-centered research, had four key recommendations:
- Share the results of comparative effectiveness research with physicians and patients and make better investments in how information is disseminated.
- Focus on the needs of priority populations such as racial and ethnic minorities, persons with disabilities, persons with multiple chronic conditions, the elderly and children.
- Focus on specific high-impact health arenas such as medical and assistive devices, surgical procedures, behavioral interventions and prevention
- Invest in data infrastructure such as linking current data sources to enable answering CER questions, development of distributed electronic data networks and partnerships with the private sector.
As part of the overall $1.1 billion initiative, ARRA required that HHS commission the Institute of Medicine to review the healthcare delivery landscape and provide guidance on the priorities for clinical effectiveness research and guidelines. IOM released their report, “100 Priorities for Comparative Effectiveness” on Wednesday. The report establishes 100 priorities, broken into four groups of 25 split up by level of priority. The report suggests that this effort is a starting point, and that as the research goes on, priorities will change.
HIMSS members and industry colleagues are reminded that AHRQ has posted a Request For Information (RFI) for public comment to help inform the Agency’s initiative to develop an electronic toolkit of information designed to assist small and medium-sized practices as they consider the benefits and challenges associated with health IT adoption. Comments are due before August 24.
Finally, we are pleased to hear Mr. Kory Mertz, research analyst for the Forum for State Health Policy Leadership at the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), will be joining ONC next week. Mr. Mertz has worked with HIMSS staff on many health IT projects at NCSL, including Project HITCh, a public-private partnership that seeks to increase legislative leadership on health IT. We look forward to working with Mr. Mertz in the future as he takes on his new responsibilities at ONC.
We welcome any questions you may have. For additional information concerning health IT policy and HIMSS government relations activities, please visit our Web site, or contact us via e-mail.
