Fed Tech Officials Laud IT Innovators at ONC Update

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology ended its two-day update of federal health IT activities on Wednesday with cheerleading from three top government information technology officials.

Aneesh Chopra, the Obama administration's chief technology officer and associate director for technology, led the first round. Although his portfolio covers a broad scope of industries, Chopra also serves on the federally charted Health IT Standards Committee and the enrollment work group of its sister HHS advisory panel, the Health IT Policy Committee.

Chopra led the crowd in a round of applause for Arien Malec, the HHS tech guru who led the development of theDirect Project, formerly NHIN Direct, an open-source software program designed to let providers exchange secure clinical messages over the Internet.

Chopra said the idea for Direct came from an Arizona physician who spoke at an Health IT Standards committee implementation workgroup meeting in November. The physician, Chopra recounted, had cut and pasted a patient's clinical information from his EHR and sent it in an e-mail to another provider because he couldn't quite figure out how to make their two EHRs communicate with one another.

"He freaked out the privacy and security crowd in the room," Chopra said, but almost a year and "25,000 lines of code later," NHIN Direct gives providers an easy and secure mechanism to do what that Arizona physician asked the government to help him do.