What's Happening in Health IT

In This Issue

Happy Friday! We have some exciting news about a new addition to the ONC family and wanted to remind you that the upcoming 5th Annual Consumer Summit is filling up fast!

ONC Chief Nursing Officer Named

On Tuesday, September 8, Rebecca Freeman joined ONC as our new Chief Nursing Officer. Rebecca will be a part of the Office of Clinical Quality and Safety where she will lead coordination on ONC’s outreach and programs impacting the nursing community, as well as co-lead ONC’s Clinical Informatics Grand Rounds. Rebecca’s nursing practice emphasizes informatics and interdisciplinary collaboration. Most recently, Rebecca was Assistant Vice President at Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), where she led the strategic and tactical planning, development, evaluation and coordination required to fully implement the Epic electronic health record. Before joining HCA, Rebecca was Chief Nursing Information Officer and Manager of the Nursing Informatics program at the Medical University of South Carolina. She earned a Bachelor of Science in nursing from the Medical University of South Carolina, and completed her Critical Care Nurse Residency in Emergency Medicine at Lexington Medical Hospital. She also holds a PhD in nursing from the Medical University of South Carolina.

Register Before It’s Too Late – 5th Annual Consumer Health IT Summit

Time is running out to register for ONC’s 5th Annual Consumer Summit!Registration is still open. This popular event is free and sells out each year. The Summit will feature inspiring consumer speakers like Steven Keating who will share his personal story about how he helped diagnose his own brain cancer and collaborated with his care team using health IT. We will also have powerful keynote speakers including White House Chief Data Scientist, DJ Patil; President of the National Partnership for Women and Families, Debra Ness; Health and Human Services Chief Technology Officer, Susannah Fox, and moderated discussion with industry leaders and consumers on a host of consumer engagement topic areas.

FCC Broadband Health Summit Agenda Released

Interested in learning more about the future of telehealth both in Florida and across the country? Want to hear how leaders across the health and technology sectors envision the health and care system of the future? The Federal Communications Commission’s Connect2Health Task Force is co-hosting a policy summit with the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville on October 1. The Broadband Health Summit, Building Connected Health and Smart Care Systems in Florida and Beyond, will highlight how broadband-enabled health technologies can transform health and care for seniors and people with disabilities. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, and Dr. Steve Ommen, head of Connected Care for the Mayo Clinic, will be featured along with senior executives from Microsoft, MDLive, Healthspot, and HCN. Agenda and additional panelist information is now available online atfcc.gov/health. This event is free and open to the public, but space is limited. If you would like to attend, please e-mail connect2health@fcc.gov with "Registration" in the subject line and provide your name, organization affiliation and contact information. For additional event information, visit fcc.gov/health.

Quality Data Model V. 4.2 Specs Released

The latest version of the Quality Data Model specification was released August 31.

Version 4.2 contains the following changes:

Enhanced support for encounter diagnoses and principal diagnoses
Re-specification of the Diagnosis data types
Re-specification of the Diagnosis, Family History data type
Re-specification of the Symptom data types
Addition of Immunization data types
Addition of reference range attributes to Laboratory Test, Performed
Removal of patient / provider preference attributes from all data types
Removal of “negation rationale” from inappropriate data types

Support for these features and modifications are expected to be released in the Measure Authoring Tool (MAT) 4.3 in October 2015.

The QDM will continue to evolve based on stakeholder input and feedback from the QDM User Group.

Accessibility and Usability conference

September 17-18, 2015 the Interagency Committee on Disability Research (ICDR) Interagency Committee on Assistive Technology (ICAT) will hold a conference titled “Accessibility and Usability in Health Information Technology (HIT): A Research & Action Conference to Empower People with Disabilities, Older Adults, and Caregivers.” The conference will be held at the U.S. Department of Education, Potomac Center Plaza, 10th Floor Auditorium, 550 12th Street SW, here in Washington, D.C. The conference is intended to advance the priority of accessibility in health IT systems and tools from a compliance-oriented approach toward one that is user-driven, responsive to human-centered consumer experiences, and results in increased patient engagement and improved health and wellness for individual disabilities, older adults, and caregivers. Registration is open!

Federal Advisory Committee Schedule Week of September 14

Friday

10:00 a.m.: Our new Precision Medicine Task Force meets. Check for the agenda here: http://bit.ly/1iAagg8