What's Happening in Health IT

In This Issue

Another big week for #PrecisionMedicine as the @WhiteHouse announced Champions of Change(#WHChamps on Twitter) last Wednesday in Washington, D.C. Using genetic information to better target illness and disease through prescription medicines and treatments that are tailored to individuals is the focus of the $215 million initiative. It’s an exciting innovation and ONC is proud to be a part of it. In fact, we have our own advisory committee on Precision Medicine meeting for the first time next Friday, not to mention lots of other events and Health IT news coming up, so read on!

Federal Health Architecture News

Did someone say ‘news?’ The latest issue of The Pulse, FHA's official e-newsletter, is available on healthit.gov/fha. In this issue, FHA talks about current efforts with its federal partners on the Argonaut Project, Healthcare Directory, Directed Exchange and Patient Consent & Authorization. The CONNECT Team also talks about development activities that have been completed and what the federal partners can look forward to as the team moves towards the release of CONNECT 4.5.

APP Factory Call For Proposals Extended Through July

The deadline to submit proposals for the NIDILRR-funded Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center for Wireless Technologies (Wireless RERC) App Factory has been extended until July 31. Wireless RERC is inviting experienced developers based in the U.S. to submit proposals for financial support to develop assistive and/or accessibility apps for mobile platforms (such as Android, Blackberry 10, iOS, Windows Phone). Apps developed in previous years through this program have included AccessNote by the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB); BrailleTouch by BrailleTech, LLC; Smart Steps by Smart Steps, LLC; ZyroSky by Zyrobotics; and IDEAL Group Reader by Apps4Android. Proposals are now due by July 31st (PDF).

New Grant Opportunity Announced

The Standards Development Organization Collaboration to Enhance Standards Alignment, Testing, and Measurement funding opportunity is available on Grants.gov. This new funding opportunity was created 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.

Cypress eCQM Testing Tool New Features

On July 23, 2015 the newest update to the Cypress eCQM testing tool is scheduled for release. There will be three updates including:

1) Cypress v2.7.0, which supports 2015 eCQM Annual Update, aligns with the May 2015 release and the June corrections of Eligible Hospital (EH) and Eligible Professional (EP) eCQM specifications published by CMS as well as with HL7 QRDA Category I Release 3 specification. The tool is not initially available for certification because the 2014 Certification Edition only applies to the current QRDA specification. This version is a tool for testing the 2015 measure specifications and the new QRDA R3 requirements for CMS submissions.

2) Cypress Validation Utility - Separate and optional utility for testing QRDA conformance against the CMS QRDA Combined Implementation Guides (IGs) and it also supports recently published 2016 CMS QRDA Combined IG. The tool also checks additional QRDA constraints required for CMS submission that are not tested with Cypress Certification which tests compliance to the base QRDA IG.

3) Cypress v2.6.1 Patch Release - Supports improvements in QRDA validation testing and is available for use in certification after Cypress v2.7.0 is released. You can use Cypress v2.6.1 to pretest and certify 2014 EH and EP eCQM packages. Finally, it will evaluate QRDA compliance against the HL7 QRDA Errata IG published in 2014 and uses Measure Bundle v2.6.0 that was issued with this release.

For more information, please see the detailed release notes. We welcome your questions and feedback about Cypress on talk@projectcypress.org.

Health IT Safety Webinar Series

Join us on July 30, 2015 from 1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. (EDT) for the eighth webinar of a 10-part series on health information technology (IT) and patient safety, “EHR Documentation and Health IT Safety.” This free webinar presents perspectives on electronic health record (EHR) documentation and its impact on health IT safety. Presenters are:

Gordon D. Schiff, MD, Associate Director, Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice, Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Schiff will talk about clinical documentation and Patient Safety - The next frontier for better diagnosis and treatment.
Adam Wright, PhD, Senior Scientist in the Division of General Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who will talk about making more accurate problem lists—challenges and recommendations and,
Anna Orlova, PhD, Senior Director for Standards at the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA). Dr. Orlova will discuss putting standards to work and improving clinical Documentation.
The moderator for the webinar will be Mark Graber, MD, a Senior Fellow at RTI International and an internationally recognized authority on diagnostic errors in medicine.

HIPAA Security Conference

Our friends at the Office of Civil Rights for HHS (@HHSOCR) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (@usnistgov) will be convening the Safeguarding Health Information: Building Assurance through HIPAA Security on September 2-3 at the Grand Hyatt in DC. So, mark your calendars and sign up now!

Federal Advisory Committee Schedule Week of July 13 (all times EDT)

Thursday

12:00 p.m.: The #HITSC Interoperability Standards Advisory Task Force meets. Check back for the agenda and meeting materials: http://bit.ly/1emRYfJ

Friday

11:30 a.m.: The Precision Medicine Task Force convenes a meeting. The agenda and meeting materials will be posted prior to the meeting: http://bit.ly/1HQ0a5L