What's Happening in Health IT

In This Issue

Maybe we should call this the high tech edition of What’s New in Health IT. From CONNECT 4.5 to Direct standards testing and the latest on CDS, UX and system redesign, this week we bring the tech news with updates to Cypress and eCQMs. Oh yeah, and big news on health IT safety too!

Safety and Health IT

Dr. Andrew Gettinger, ONC’s chief medical information officer, lays out the roadmap to improving health IT safety in a new blog posted earlier today. Many EHRs ‘will benefit from additional usability review, safety-enhanced design and feedback from the user community,” Dr. Gettinger writes. Read the blog now!

Health IT Safety Webinar Series

Speaking of safety, 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.

Slides and audio of previous webinars in this series are also now available.

ONC Consumer Summit

Save the date! The 5th Annual ONC Consumer Summit will be held October 1, 2015, in Washington, DC. Mark your calendars and stay tuned for additional details soon.

FHA Releases CONNECT 4.5!

The enhanced version of CONNECT builds upon current enhancements -- furthering CONNECT as a platform that supports interoperability across the health care space and enables the secure exchange of data. All FHA federal partners are encouraged to implement this new version of CONNECT that has the following features:

• Additional logging and auditing capabilities.
• Additional functionality in the System Administration Module, making it more user friendly.
• Ability to configure a message timeout by transaction rather than at the gateway/service level, providing a powerful tool in the management of implementation message traffic.
• Works on the latest versions of WebLogic and JBoss Wildfly -- furthering adaptability and deployment flexibility.
• Updated and increased support for Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) implementations.
• Additional improvements to testing, including Direct testing, in both rigor and automation are included. Questions? Please e-mail federal.health@hhs.gov

Provider Demonstration of Meaningful Use of EHRs Visualized

The ONC Health IT Dashboard this week features data updates to visualizations of hospitals’ and office-based professionals’ demonstration of meaningful use of certified health IT! Hospitals Participating in the CMS EHR Incentive Programs provides the percentage of all eligible and Critical Access hospitals, and Office-based Health Care Professional Participation in the CMS EHR Incentive Programs provides the percentage of all office-based physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants that have demonstrated meaningful use of CEHRT, as well as adopted, implemented, or upgraded any EHR. Want to dig a little deeper? Check out the updates to the Dashboard’s meaningful use dashboards. Hospitals Demonstrating Meaningful Use through Medicare EHR Incentive Program provides state drill-downs into hospital participation, and Office-based Physicians Demonstrating Meaningful Use through Medicare EHR Incentive Program provides state reports and county maps of the percentage of office-based physicians that have demonstrated meaningful use through the Medicare program.

Attention Researchers Interested in Privacy and Security Issues

ONC is still accepting applications for a Privacy and Security Research Scientist IPA. Candidates with a high level of expertise in the field of biomedical research and knowledge of privacy and security technical best practices related to research policy requirements for patient centered outcomes research (PCOR) should apply. Candidates must have demonstrated knowledge of health informatics, including familiarity with common technical infrastructure requirements for research data use and understanding of health data flows, as well as demonstrated knowledge of privacy and security laws impacting data held for research and patient outcome activities. Submit resume or CV toprivacyandsecurity@hhs.gov by Wednesday, July 22, 2015.

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.

Webinar: Use Health IT to Improve Clinical Workflow

AHRQ is hosting a webinar Wednesday, July 29 from 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. ET on how health IT can be used to support improvements in clinical workflow. Research suggests that health IT can assist in providers’ information processing, health care decision making, and ultimately, the delivery of high quality of care. However, health IT applications can limit rather than support a provider’s ability to provide care unless appropriately designed to take into account their information needs and workflow processes. Researchers on this Web conference will discuss how health IT used in diverse settings including primary care offices and emergency departments can be better designed to support clinical workflow and improve patient care. Registration is open.

Direct Transport Standard Testing Services

We are pleased to announce that Cerner, CureMD.com, Inc., Epic Systems Corporation and iPatientCare, Inc. have stepped forward to provide Direct Transport Standard testing services to providers and implementers through ONC’s Standards Implementation and Testing Environment (SITE) given the recent FAQ issued by CMS to discontinue the CMS Test EHR Program. We would like to thank health IT developer participants including CMS and The National Institute of Standards and Technology (who administered the “EHR Randomizer”) for their collaboration in this transition. ONC will evaluate this approach to determine further expansion to include additional interoperability testing services. We invite additional health IT developers to participate in this testing program. For more information please visit SITE or submit questions to xvendor.exchange@hhs.gov.

CDS, UX and System Redesign News

Our friends at AcademyHealth want to share the latest eGEMs special issue released this week onCDS, UX, and system redesign. The issue provides interesting examples of design and development approaches that could be extended to other applications, as well as evaluative strategies, so check it out! A special thanks to Dr. Tom McGinn of Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine for serving as the guest editor of this special issue.

Federal Advisory Committee Schedule Week of July 20 (all times EDT)

Tuesday

10:00 a.m.: The #HITPC Quality Measurement Task Force meets. Find the agenda here:http://bit.ly/1f3NoUa

Thursday

10:00 a.m.: The new Clinical, Technical, Organizational & Financial Barriers to Interop Task Force convenes a meeting. Follow along here: http://bit.ly/1M5SIDt

Friday

2:30 p.m.: The Quality Measurement Task Force convenes a meeting Friday at 2:30pm. Learn more:http://bit.ly/1I2EVxN