HIMSS: Direct/CONNECT Update

Jeff Byers | CMIO | February 23, 2011

In the last year, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has gone from 38 employees to 138 due to the HITECH Act, said Doug Fridsma, MD, PhD, director at the Office of Interoperability & Standards at the ONC before speaking to an audience on the agency’s update to CONNECT and the Direct Project during the 2011 Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) conference.

“Technology is not the primary goal,” said Fridsma. “It’s about adoption” and in the end, ONC wants that adoption of technology to help find avenues to meaningful use. To work toward meaningful use, ONC needs to establish trust and part of establishing larger conditions of trust is to establish trust locally, Fridsma stated.

The national health IT agenda, including the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and the President’s reform agenda, focuses on building an open and transparent government.