An Update to the National eHealth Collaborative

Today I'm in Washington presenting a HITSP update to the National eHealth Collaborative. My slides are available.

A few highlights:

1. HITSP has "turned on a dime" to focus on meaningful use and ARRA's 8 priorities:
-Technologies that protect the privacy of health information
-A nationwide health information technology infrastructure
-The utilization of a certified electronic record for each person in the US by 2014
-Technologies that support accounting of disclosures made by a covered entity
-The use of electronic records to improve quality
-Technologies that enable identifiable health information to be rendered unusable/unreadable
-Demographic data collection including race, ethnicity, primary language, and gender
-Technologies that address the needs of children and other vulnerable populations

2. HITSP has embraced a service oriented architecture which enables reuse of capabilities instead of requiring new value cases for each novel requirement. Our initial services include:
- Issue Ambulatory Prescriptions
- Query for Medication History
- Communication of Structured Documents
- Communication of Unstructured Documents
- Clinical Referral Request
- Retrieval of Medical Knowledge
- Return Laboratory Results Message
- Communication of Laboratory Reports
- Communication of Imaging Information
- Quality Measures for Hospital based Quality Information Collection and Reporting
- Quality Measures for Clinician Quality Information Collection and Reporting
- Immunization Registry Update
- Immunization Registry Query
- Communication of Immunization Documents
- Vaccine and Drug Inventory Reporting
- Public Health Case Reporting
- Emergency Common Alerting
- Send and Receive Relevant Bio-Surveillance Data
- Communicate Resource Utilization
- Exchange Administrative Benefits/Eligibility Transactions
- Exchange Administrative Referral/Authorization Transactions
- Provider Directory

3. HITSP is moving to an electronic publication approach for all its implementation guidance.

4. HITSP has embraced USHIK as a respository for its harmonized standards and codesets

5. The July 15 deliverables will directly support the needs of the HIT Standards Committee and its workgroups to identify standards, implementation guidance, and certification criteria in support of meaningful use.

Next week, the HIT Standards Committee Workgroups will meet for the first time. HITSP volunteers and staff will ensure all this ARRA specific work is communicated to those groups.