What's Happening in Health IT

In This Issue

Summer may now be in full swing, but we continue to forge ahead to help you use Health IT to provide better care, smarter spending and healthier people! BTW, in case you missed it, we had quite a discussion on Twitter earlier this week about #HealthIT and #PrecisionMedicine. You can check out all the tweets by searching #PMINetwork. Oh yeah, have a happy Independence Day!

Reminder! Don’t forget that we published a notice in the Federal Register that restated our continued investment in working with the health IT industry towards a more streamlined health IT testing and certification system. This notice addressed a flexibility included in the ONC Health IT Certification Program - specifically the National Coordinator’s ability to approve test procedures, test tools, and test data developed by non-governmental entities. Please take part in this open opportunity!

Direct Standard Testing Services To Continue

ONC is pleased to announce that Test EHR Program participants, Cerner Corporation, Epic, and iPatientCare, Inc. have agreed to continue to offer their Direct Transport Standard testing services to providers and implementers given the recent FAQ issued by CMS. The continued ability to test with these program participants will be made available shortly through ONC’s Standards Implementation and Testing Environment, which many of you know as SITE. ONC will evaluate this new approach to determine whether it could be expanded to include additional interoperability testing in the future. We wish to thank all of the providers and health IT developers that participated in the CMS Test EHR Program. Since its inception in January 2014, the NIST EHR Randomizer has matched more than 7000 providers using nearly 400 different certified electronic health record systems with CMS Designated Test EHRs to meet measure 3 of the Meaningful Use Stage 2 Summary of Care objective. ONC also invites additional health IT developers to join this testing program. For more information please visit SITE or submit questions to xvendor.exchange@hhs.gov.

New Grant Announced

The Standards Development Organization Collaboration to Enhance Standards Alignment, Testing, and Measurement funding opportunity is available on Grants.gov. This new funding opportunity is to provide ongoing collaboration between ONC and various standards development organizations (SDOs) to provide support for standards and interoperability work that is of interest to ONC.

Immunization Information Services MU e-reporting

The Health IT Dashboard is live with two new Quick Stats that visualize the percent of Medicare EHR Incentive Program professionals who electronically report to Immunization Information Services (IIS). Quick Stat #48 shows the 2011 to 2014 reporting trends amongst participating professionals, and Quick Stat #49 compares performance between professionals that attested to stage 1 and those that attested to stage 2 of meaningful use.

New Report on Workflow, Patient Portals and Secure Messaging

A new report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality examines the use of health IT in ambulatory care practice redesign and the subsequent impact on patients and provider workflow. The report (Using Health Information Technology in Practice Redesign: Impact of Health IT on Workflow—Patient Reported Health Information Technology and Workflow) documents workflow impacts of applications that allow patients to share information with primary care providers electronically. The report found information sharing technologies had both positive and negative effects on clinician and staff workflow, while patients generally reported that these technologies had a positive impact on their ability to share information with their provider. With two exceptions, the clinics studied did not redesign their workflows to incorporate the capture and use of patient-related information. AHRQ will be releasing additional research from related projects on health IT and workflow later this year.

Security Risk Assessment Tool Glitch Fixed

The Security Risk Assessment Tool has been updated to address an issue that caused some users to receive a certificate error message.

Federal Advisory Committee Schedule Week of July 6 (all times EDT)

Tuesday

11:00 a.m.: The Health IT Policy Committee’s Quality Measurement Task Force meets. Follow along here: http://bit.ly/1ejqeJ7

Thursday

12:00 p.m.: The Health IT Standard Committee’s Interoperability Standards Advisory Task Force meets. Watch for the agenda and meeting materials here: http://bit.ly/1IO0aOj

Health IT-enabled Clinical Quality Improvement Tools for Providers

Providers and those individuals and organizations involved in electronic clinical quality improvement (eCQI) activities are encouraged to visit ONC’s new online resources to learn:

What clinical decision support (CDS) is and how it plays a vital role in health care delivery improvement and practice transformation.
Why we measure care processes and outcomes.
How to begin planning and implementing improved care processes by using step by step processes -- and tools available for download at no cost to providers.
Where to get additional information on using interoperable health IT to improve health and care.