September HIT Committee Meetings

The HIT Standards Committee met on the 15th this month. From the Clinical Quality workgroup, an update to the measure grid for meaningful use. Of the 29 recommended set of measures, 17 can be retooled for EHRs, 10 are for EHR utilization, and 2 are for Privacy and Security. Retooling will begin on 9/21.  Also a review of the measure submission workflow with Clinical Operations to identify IT standards. The Privacy & Security workgroup presented its most recent standards selection, certification criteria, and implementation guidance. And finally the Clinical Operations workgroup presentation covered a summary of the standards required for meaningful use with details on implementation guidance.

For extra credit and a meaningful summary of this meeting, read The Latest Deliverable from the HIT Standards Committee by John Halamka, MD. Their next meeting will be October 14.

The HIT Policy Committee met on the 18th this month. The meeting was a break from the usual updates and presentations by the workgroups. This meeting was an initial informational public hearing for input on privacy policies and security functions recommendations for 2013 and 2015 meaningful use criteria. The committee heard testimony with presentations in four categories:

  1. Individual patient choice, control, and data segmentation of health information
  2. Use, disclosure, secondary use, and data stewardship
  3. Aggregate data use, de-identification/re-identification, models for data storage and exchange
  4. Transparency, accountability, audit.

Their next meeting will be October 27th and 28th. Here are some articles on the testimonies.

Privacy experts face off over patient control, policy safeguards
Patient Privacy Rights Urges the HIT Policy Committee: Require Privacy Vendors Will Build It, Doctors Will Buy It, and Most Importantly, Patients Will Trust It.
HIT policy committee holds privacy hearing today
Electronic health records open patient privacy questions
Policy Committee Holds Hearing on Health IT Privacy, Security