The Department of Health and Human Services took another step in its efforts to streamline healthcare IT this month, releasing its final roadmap for connecting health information systems over the next decade.
The strategy, devised by Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, seeks to make it easier to share healthcare information across a wide network, but secure enough to ensure privacy from would-be hackers. In September, ONCHIT released a health IT strategic plan that covers the next five years.
“We have made important progress in making health records available to patients and shareable among their doctors,” said HHS secretary Sylvia M. Burwell, in an Oct. 6 statement. “This shift will put patients at the center of their health care, improve the quality of the services they receive and advance safety overall.”
The roadmap, which has been a year in the making, sets near-team to long-term goals for ONC to achieve between now and 2024 to achieve interoperability, in partnership with the private sector.
“This Roadmap has been developed in partnership with the private sector and provides a clear, strategic approach to see that we successfully achieve seamless interoperability by creating the right financial incentives, establishing shared and explicit standards, and developing a trusted environment for data flow that enables patients to make their health records accessible anywhere they choose to seek care,” said Karen DeSalvo, national coordinator for health IT.
The roadmap was developed from HHS’s June 2014 vision paper on how to achieve interoperability within the next decade.
The paper outlined the broad goals of information exchange between public and private partners after convening ONC’s Federal Health IT Advisory Council and taking more than 400 comments from stakeholders about how to modernize the healthcare system in a more data-centric age.
Over the next two years, stakeholders will identify data domains to improve healthcare outcomes. After expanding data sources to ensure more fluid information exchange, HHS hopes to have a real-time information systems to improve care in-place by 2024.
To protect the privacy of those whose information is in the system, HHS plans to work with officials at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and other stakeholders, to develop protections against cyber threats.
“Together, the public and private-sectors can transform health care by developing policy, programs and products to liberate the data stored in various health information technology tools,” HHS officials said in a statement.
