President Obama's Health Information Technology (HIT) advisors are calling upon federal regulators to create a "universal language exchange" where healthcare data can be exchanged efficiently and with enhanced privacy and security controls.
The advisors made their recommendations in a report released last week, "Realizing the Full Potential of Health Information Technology to Improve Healthcare for Americans: The Path Forward."
The advisors' foresee a healthcare industry of electronic health records that:
- Modernizes diagnosis and treatment
- Improves public health
- Enhances the privacy and security of personal data
- Creates new high-technology markets and jobs while catalyzing healthcare-related economic reforms
"The United States spends more on healthcare as a fraction of gross domestic product than any other industrialized nation, yet we lag on critical measures such as life expectancy and infant mortality," said Eric Lander, co-chair of the group of advisors, called the "President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology" (PCAST), in a statement. "Information technology has the potential to vastly improve patient care and create new markets based on health care innovation—but only if we make wise decisions now. This report outlines a path to achieving these aims."
The advisors made several recommendations to the government agencies involved with HIT and privacy and security, including:
The Chief Technology Officer should:
- Develop within 12 months a set of metrics that measure progress toward operational, university, national healthy IT infrastructure
- Annually assess the nation's progress in health IT by the metrics developer, and make recommendations to how to make more rapid progress
The Office of the National Coordinator should:
- Move more boldly to ensure the nation has EHR systems that are able to exchange health data in a universal manner based on metadata-tagged data elements
- Facilitate the emergence of competitive companies that would provide small or under-resourced physician practices, community-based long-term care facilities, and hospitals with a range of cloud-based services
CMS should:
- Redirect the focus of meaningful use measures as rapidly as possible from data collection of specified lists of health measures to higher levels of data exchange and the increase use of clinical decision supports
- By 2013, provide incentives for hospitals and eligible professionals to submit meaningful use clinical measures that are calculated from computable data. By 2015, encourage or require that quality measures under all of its reporting programs (Physician Quality Reporting Initiative, hospitals, Medicare Advantage plans, nursing homes, etc.) be able to be collected in a tagged data element model
HHS should:
- Propose an appropriate structure of administrative, civil and criminal penalties for the misuse of national health IT infrastructure and individual patient records
- Appoint a working group to develop policies and standards for the appropriate secondary uses of healthcare data
The full report may be viewed here.