New This Week on HealthIT.gov

In This Issue

• Person at the Center
• More Health IT Buzz blog posts
• HIE Governance report published
• National Learning Consortium
• Intro to Meaningful Use & ONC Certification Process
• Beacon Learning Guides
• 2014 MUS2 Transitions of Care Connect-a-thon

Congratulations on surviving the Polar Vortex! Hope you all stayed toasty and are making plans to visit us during our Annual Meeting, January 23rd. We may not know what the weather will be doing then, but we are looking forward to seeing you all! We have more information about the Annual Meeting on HealthIT.gov.

Person at the Center

ONC's Office of Policy and Planning released an issue brief and a blog by Jodi Daniel(@JodiDaniel) that further develop the health IT policy framework for achieving a more “person-centric” vision for effective health management by individuals, their caregivers, and their health care teams by the year 2020, supported by health IT. The "Person at the Center" issue brief describes the vision, core values and goals of the framework as well current related activities underway at ONC and other organizations. The issue brief also describes opportunities, challenges, and next steps toward achieving the vision.

More Health IT Buzz blog posts

We published a trio of new blog posts this week that you might want to read at your leisure. ONC’s Office of Economic Analysis Evaluation and Modeling published aliterature review based on a new Rand Study, which shows Health IT can help improve health outcomes. Up next is a post by Dr. Michael Gilbert, an Orange County, Calif. family physician and one of our HealthIT Fellows, who talks about the benefits of using a patient portal to spur a conversation between patients and doctors. Finally, Dr. Jacob Reider, the acting national coordinator, writes about ONC efforts to make Health IT systems more usable for doctors and other providers. The responses to the blog post have been very informative so add your two cents!

HIE Governance Forum's Resources and Report Published

Have you ever wondered about Health Information Exchange (HIE) governance? New resources posted on HealthIT.gov could help you understand the topic. We posted an Identity Management educational resource, a whitepaper on a Trust Framework, a preliminary HIE Certification and Accreditation Landscape and the final report from the National HIE Governance Forum. The National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC) convened the National HIE Governance Forum at ONC's request, through ONC's cooperative agreement with NeHC. Learn more at the HIE Governance page.

National Learning Consortium

Bogged down with EHR contracts and legal speak? Learn EHR contracts: key contract termsin this guide for purchasers and users of EHR systems. This guide features examples and plain language explanations to help organizations, who rely on EHRs for critical aspects of their operations, understand key contractual terms. Get on your way to implementing your EHR today!

To view other NLC resources, visit the EHR implementation lifecycle steps.

Intro to Meaningful Use & ONC Certification Process

Coming up next week: ONC’s Steven Posnack (@HealthIT_Policy) and Practice Fusion's Lauren Fifield will be leading a webinar on Wednesday, January 15 at 3 pm EST to help IT innovators learn more about Meaningful Use (MU) and ONC's Health IT Certification program. Steve and Lauren will discuss the basics of Meaningful Use from a developer’s perspective, including the different roles federal agencies play. They will also talk about parts of MU that impact applications/tools for developers that need access to EHR data, or serve as add-ons to EHR systems. Don’t miss this opportunity to ask questions and learn how these regulations are changing the Health IT landscape.

Beacon Learning Guides

You may have missed this late last year, so we’re running again! The 17 ONC-funded Beacon Communities have compiled and synthesized their lessons learned from building health IT infrastructure, driving population health improvement and testing innovative approaches during the three-year program. This information is now available in six Learning Guides offering proven strategies and actionable information that can be adapted by hospitals, health systems, individual practices, and health-focused community organizations to help them advance community-level health care transformation using health IT.

The Learning Guides include:

• Key foundational elements to support successful planning and implementation
• Strategic and implementation objectives with execution tactics and case studies
• Resources used by Beacon Communities such as process maps and sample documents

2014 MUS2 Transitions of Care Connect-a-thon

Are you an Eligible Provider or Eligible Hospital working to achieve Stage 2 MU transitions of care (TOC) requirements? We're hosting a Connect-a-thon that will engage EHR vendors and HISPs in end-to-end interoperability testing of CCDA care summary exchange at the 2014 Meaningful Use (MU) Stage 2 Transitions of Care Connect-a-thon on February 4 & 5 at Alexandria, VA's Embassy Suites.

If you are a technologist from an EHR vendor or HISP working on CCDA care summary exchange via Direct or you plan to support MU Stage 2 or deploy products certified to the 2014 edition HIT certification, you should join us for this event. The Connect-a-thon will build on earlier sessions designed to further MU Stage 2 exchange by accelerating testing and troubleshooting across platforms that use Direct specifications to exchange CCDA documents.

For additional information, please contact Thad Flood.