Steve Posnack

See the following -

2017 Emerges as Pivotal Year for FHIR Interoperability Standard

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | January 5, 2017

Health Level Seven International’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) application programming interface is moving closer to becoming a mature standard, with the “normative” version slated for release sometime in 2017. Standards are widely perceived as providing the greatest potential for achieving national health IT interoperability in the near future. In particular, FHIR is seen by industry stakeholders as a promising solution to the complex interoperability challenges that are confronting healthcare organizations...

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3 Global Health IT Takeaways You Need to Know - Reflections from ONC 3rd Interoperability Forum

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) engages in several global health IT projects from a United States government perspective. ONC works with global counterparts to share experiences, and ensure alignment between global interoperability efforts and the United States' approaches to interoperability. This includes working through worldwide partnerships, bi-lateral and multi-lateral engagements, global networks, and memoranda of understanding. Through these engagements, we focus on advancing common health data standards for global interoperability, enhancing individuals' access to their data, progressing healthcare providers' experiences, and improving factors associated with transparency and competition.

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Blue Button Developers to Meet at the White House Today - Verma and Liddell to Open the Conference

More than 700 app developers and eHealth groups and organizations have registed to meet today at the White House for the first Blue Button 2.0 developer conference. The "The inaugural Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference will bring together application developers in the technical community to help build and develop new tools to help patients understand their health data,” said Seema Verma, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in a statement. 

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Halamka's Notes on the December HIT Standards Committee Meeting

The December HIT Standards Committee included a review of the draft Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, recommendations about identity management from the Transport and Security Workgroup, an overview of the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program, and a discussion of upcoming task force work as we all prepare for the publication of the ONC interoperability roadmap and the Meaningful Use Stage 3 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.

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Halamka's Notes on the November HIT Standards Committee Meeting

The November HIT Standards Committee focused on “asynchronous bilateral cutover” - the compatibility of different CCDA payloads, healthcare IT that supports long term services and support,  an update on the Standards & Interoperability projects, a discussion of data provenance efforts, and the HITSC workgroup organization. Read More »

Halamka's Report on The April 2015 HIT Standards Committee Meeting

The April 2015 HITSC meeting focused on the Certification Rule NPRM and a comprehensive review of the Federal Interoperability Roadmap. I suggested that a guiding principle for the committee’s work is to emphasize the enablers in the proposals while reducing those aspects that create substantial burden/slow innovation.   As a federal advisory committee our job is to temper regulatory ambition with operational reality.

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Halamka's Report on the August 2015 HIT Standards Committee

The August 2015 HIT Standards Committee marked the beginning of an important transition. As work on Meaningful Use winds down, it is being replaced with work on Obama’s signature precision medicine initiative and planning for the 2016 Interoperability Standards Advisory. At the same time, many of the longstanding HIT Standards Committee members of have reached their term limits and are being replaced by new experts.   I will leave the group in January.

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Halamka's Report on the Joint HIT Standards and Policy Committee Meeting

All the members of the ONC Federal Advisory Committees met in Washington to review delivery system reform and the Interoperability Roadmap. We began the meeting with a thank you to Jodi Daniel, who will be leaving ONC after 10 years of service. Elizabeth Holland presented a data update on the Meaningful Use program. She noted that 2015 attestation will open Jan 4, 2016-Feb 29, 2016. The Meaningful Use Stage 2 final rule has not yet been released (but rumor suggests it may be released later today). Next, Karen DeSalvo presented a Delivery System Reform Update  setting the context for the kinds of interoperability needed in the future as fee for service is replaced by population-based payment.

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HHS Announces Synthetic Health Data Challenge Winners

Press Release | US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) | September 21, 2021

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) today announced $100,000 in total awards to six winners of the Synthetic Health Data Challenge (Challenge). Synthetic health data (i.e., data that is artificially created to mimic real-world data), is important to researchers, health IT developers, and informaticians, among others, who need data to test new ideas until access to secure and actual clinical data is available.

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Investigating Blockchain's Role in Health Info Exchange

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee | Gov Info Security | February 23, 2017

Federal regulators are considering the role that blockchain technology could play in advancing the secure exchange of healthcare information, says Steve Posnack of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. Blockchain - an open source distributed ledger technology that's associated with the cryptocurrency bitcoin - "has a lot of different potential implementations, and I think its diversity in how it can be implemented is one of the attractive features. It's not just a one-trick pony," he says in an interview at the HIMSS17 conference in Orlando...

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National Patient Data Matching Strategy: Algorithm Challenge

Thomas M Leary | HIMSS | May 8, 2017

The announcement last week that ONC will be launching a Patient Matching Algorithm Challenge is the next big step in the health IT community’s efforts to ensure patient safety through advancements in interoperability. As a community, we’ve been working on the patient data matching issue for many years.  HIMSS has worked very closely with our friends across the healthcare community to understand the barriers to accurate, efficient matching of patients to their health information...

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Notes on the August Meeting of the HIT Standards Committee

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 »

Notes on the July Meeting of the HIT Standards Committee

The July meeting of the HIT Standards Committee included important discussions of certification for post acute care and behavior health applications, review of data segmentation for privacy,  analysis of provider directory standards, an update on the standards/interoperability framework projects, and a first look at the new subcommittee co-chairs of the Standards Committee... Read More »

Notes on the June Meeting of the HIT Standards Committee

The June HIT Standards Committee focused on an update and evaluation of the standards and interoperability framework initiatives, consistent with the overall theme of ONC’s recent reorganization and strategic plan to focus on fewer goals with a greater depth. Steve Posnack, who now leads the ONC Office of Standards and Technology, introduced the topic... Read More »

Stakeholders Look to Improve C-CDA as FHIR Matures

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | August 2, 2017

As the healthcare industry continues to wrestle with interoperability challenges, two standards are poised to play a central role in facilitating the electronic exchange of health information—one is a blunt tool for data sharing, while the other is a surgical instrument. First adopted in 2012 as part of the Office of National Coordinator for Health IT’s 2014 Edition final rule, the Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) version 1.1—developed through the joint efforts of ONC and Health Level Seven (HL7) International—is now widely used among healthcare providers...

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