The HIT Policy Committee and its workgroups met this month. The Meaningful Use (MU) workgroup met twice, the NHIN, Planning, Privacy, and HIE met once. All workgroup meetings are now open to the public and each has their own web page on the ONC site. For all future meetings and links to the ONC site, visit our committee page. On the 13th, the Policy Committee met and reviewed the new proposed rules. Tony Trenkle of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid and Farzad Mostashari of the ONC presented an overview of the CMS NPRM. In the presentation they stated that the NPRM:
- Harmonizes MU criteria across CMS programs as much as possible
- Closely links with the ONC certification and standards IFR
- Builds on the recommendations of the HIT Policy Committee
- Coordinates with the existing CMS quality initiatives
- Provides a platform that allows for a staged implementation over time
They also discussed where the differences were from the Policy committee’s recommendations. View the presentation here.
Farzad Mostashari, Doug Fridsma, and Jodi Daniel, all from the ONC, presented an overview of the IFR on Initial Set of Standards, Implementation Specifications, and Certification Criteria for EHRs. They explained how certification criteria was created from the MU objectives, how standards are organized in 4 categories, and how these will work together.
The HIT Standards Committee and its workgroups also met this month. The Privacy, Implementation, and Clinical Quality workgroups all met. All workgroup meetings are now open to the public and each has their own web page on the ONC site. For all future meetings and links to the ONC site, visit our Committee page. At the Standards Committee meeting on the 20th, both the CMS NPRM and the ONC IFR presentations from the Policy meeting were presented. The ONC IFR presentation did however, discuss in detail the actual standards being proposed. View the presentation here.