In August 2022 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) launched the 2022 Public Health Data Systems Task Force as a subcommittee of the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC). The task force will meet through the beginning of November to present recommendations continuing and building upon the work of the 2021 task force. Members of the task force include individuals from various levels of government, relevant public health associations, and industry partners. Specifically, the task force is focused on the certification criteria for EHR products certified under the ONC Health IT Certification Program that cover transmission of data from EHRs to public health in these domains...
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)
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Major Interoperability Initiative Launched During the Annual Meeting of The Sequoia Project
By Michael J. Suralik | December 20, 2019
On December 5, 2019, HLN Consulting, LLC participated in The Sequoia Project's day long annual meeting which was held just outside of Washington, D.C. at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center. As a leading healthcare informatics consulting company HLN monitors developments in healthcare interoperability nationally with particular emphasis on the impact to public health agencies and their stakeholders. This conference represented a good opportunity to participate in the start of a major interoperability initiative that will play out over the next several years. In addition to this report, the Sequoia Project posted the proceedings of the meeting online, including the recorded discussions as well as the slides from the presentations. Read More »
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Medal Unveils Platform to Pioneer the Creation of a Unified, Contextual Record of Health
Press Release |
Medal, Inc. |
February 11, 2019
Medal Inc. today announced the debut of its platform that can extract, transform and use the vast and fragmented information that exists about patients - and present it to healthcare providers in a timely and meaningful way. Health data is only purposeful when it is accessible and contextual. Medal developed a complete system for extracting medical information from every possible source where data is trapped: fax, printed paper, health information exchange data, and from EMRs. Machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) match more than 300 medical attributes to each word of unstructured text, allowing clinicians to more easily gain access to critical data that could save a patient's life.
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Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce Issue Joint Statement Making Commitment to Open Source Healthcare Interoperability
Josh Mandel | Microsoft Industry Blog | August 13, 2018
Interoperability is an overlapping set of technical and policy challenges, from data access to common data models to information exchange to workflow integration – and these challenges often pose a barrier to healthcare innovation. Microsoft has been engaged for many years on developing best practices for interoperability across industries. Today, as health IT community leaders get together at the CMS Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference here in Washington, DC, we’re pleased to announce that Microsoft has joined with Amazon, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce in support of healthcare interoperability...
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National ONC Blockchain Challenge Explores Micro-Identities to Improve Healthcare Interoperability
Peter B. Nichols | CIO | August 23, 2016
A lot has been written covering blockchain and healthcare over the past year. From articles on blockchain applications for healthcare to articles by healthcare industry experts exploring blockchain technology as the solution for healthcare interoperability. In early 2016 Forbes published an article titled "How Blockchain Could Change the World." The world is talking about uses of blockchain in the financial services industry. This seems reasonable given that there has been $1.2 billion invested in blockchain startups. The majority of these investments have been within the financial sector...
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Navigating the Challenges of International Teamwork
By Tony McCormick | September 14, 2016
I started my open source work from Oregon, USA working on a project in the "Republic" of Texas. While that, at first glance, does not sound international in nature, I can assure you that Oregon and Texas might as well be different countries. I experienced both the joy and frustration of working with users from both places that had big cultural differences, as well as overlapping needs. This early experience laid the groundwork for the future, where I got to work at the international level on OpenEMR, an electronic healthcare records system...
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New Blue Button Directory Unveiled at HIMSS17
Press Release |
National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE) |
February 20, 2017
The National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE) today unveiled NATE's Blue Button Directory (NBBD) at the HIMSS17 annual conference in Orlando, FL. This FHIR-based solution is the newest prototype being developed by NATE to make it easier for consumers and providers to share data to improve outcomes. Consumers are actively requesting their medical records and providers want to share them but there is often a workflow disconnect between the two. As part of the Federal Health Architecture's vignette in the HIMSS17 Interoperability Showcase (Level 2 | Lobby F | Tangerine Ballroom | Booth 9000), NATE and its partners are demonstrating how a simple enabling infrastructure can alleviate this problem...
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New Technology Makes EMRs Easier, Searchable, More Secure
Press Release |
Medal, Inc., HIMSS17 |
February 21, 2017
According the the Office of the National Coordinator, roughly 30% of providers have no Health Information Exchange outside of faxing. Medal’s innovative technology “meets providers where they are." Medal makes it easy to share data with its product “print to FHIR." Medal software replaces existing fax-based workflows and streamlines health information sharing, creating opportunities to improve health care, reduce effort, and assist research. Medal also connects to existing health information systems such as EMRs and HIEs using FHIR -- “Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources” -- a quickly emerging standard for health information sharing.
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Notes on the August Meeting of the HIT Standards Committee
By John D. Halamka, MD | August 25, 2014
The August HIT Standards Committee meeting focused on the work ahead to accelerate interoperability. It’s no longer about Meaningful Use, it’s about Meaningful healthcare information exchange. I offered my opinion about the work ahead. ONC is in the middle of regulation writing for Meaningful Use Stage 3, so the standards work of the next 10 weeks is not going to be incorporated into the NPRM. Read More »
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Notes on the October Joint Meeting of the Standards and Policy Committee
By John D. Halamka, MD | October 14, 2014
Today the future of interoperability was discussed and endorsed by a joint meeting of the Standards and Policy Committees. We began with a preamble clearly stating that the roadmap we’re working on is a process not a finished product. Karen DeSalvo, Jacob Reider, Paul Tang and I offered framing comments for the day... Read More »
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Number of Public HIEs Drop, Bringing Viability into Question
Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | July 8, 2016
Despite federal funding that aided their creation, the number of community and state health information exchanges is declining as HIEs struggle to remain financially viable now that seed money has dried up. Those are among the results of a new national survey published in the July issue of Health Affairs that tracked community and state HIE efforts soon after federal funding ended. “We found 106 operational HIE efforts that, as a group, engaged more than one-third of all U.S. providers in 2014,” states the study’s authors...
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O'Reilly Report Explores Open Solutions to Health IT
By Andy Oram | April 6, 2014
Although many programmers and public interest advocates come to the concepts of free software, standards, open data, and transparent institutions out of idealism, modern businesses and governments are being driven to these same solutions out of the practical need to meet high expectations with diminishing resources. The ways in which the health care field has been incrementally adopting these paths are the subject of a new report, written by me and released by O'Reilly Media, called The Information Technology Fix for Health: Barriers and Pathways to the Use of Information Technology for Better Health Care. Read More »
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Obama Administration Announces Key Actions to Accelerate Precision Medicine Initiative
Press Release |
The White House |
February 25, 2016
A year ago the President announced the launch of the Precision Medicine Initiative to accelerate a new era of medicine that delivers the right treatment at the right time to the right person, taking into account individuals’ health history, genes, environments, and lifestyles. Precision medicine is already transforming the way diseases like cancer and mental health conditions are treated. Molecular testing for cancer patients lets physicians and patients select treatments that improve chances of survival and reduce adverse effects...
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ONC Launches Public Health Data Systems Task Force
By Noam H. Arzt, Ph.D. | September 18, 2022
ONC Playbook Breaks Down Health IT, EHR Tasks and Buzzwords
Jennifer Bresnick | HealthIT Analytics | September 27, 2016
The healthcare industry seems to be largely driven by buzzwords: quick and snappy phrases that reduce complex, difficult, expensive and often confusing initiatives into keywords that may not mean much to the uninitiated. From big data and population health management to electronic health records and value-based care, these short and sweet terms have come to define the new direction of one of the nation’s largest sectors...
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ONC Releases Beta Scorecard for C-CDA Documents
Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | July 20, 2016
A new tool released by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is being offered to providers and developers to help them identify and resolve interoperability issues involving Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) documents in their HIT systems. Read More »
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