The Department of Health and Human Services has spent the fall rolling out what officials hope with be the ultimate playbook for streamlining healthcare delivery and information infrastructure.
HHS’s Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT first rolled out its strategic plan on Sept. 21, offering a view into the four goals it hopes to achieve by 2020.
Gretchen Wyatt, senior strategic advisor for ONC, said the plan would be the foundation that helps engage stakeholders handle the future challenges of developing a healthcare information-sharing system.
“Definitely this plan is a floor and not a ceiling,” she said. “I would say that things are going to be changing dramatically over the next several years and that affords us opportunities to make sure we are offering really useful guidance to the public and to our federal partners.”
The plan targets four goals, including advancing person-centered and self-managed health, fostering research and innovation, transforming health care delivery and community health and enhancing the nation’s healthcare IT infrastructure.
Resource: Read the plan
Part of the plan calls for building an IT infrastructure that would allow for interoperability between systems to share health information seamlessly with healthcare stakeholders while protecting the privacy of the patient records that would be on the networks.
HHS released its Interoperability Roadmap on Oct. 6, which lays out ONC’s goals for helping establish the infrastructure over the next decade.
Wyatt said the plan itself afforded ONC the ability to build relationships across the federal spectrum on how to address healthcare IT now and in the future.
“The joy of working on the strategic plan was not in producing a plan,” she said. “It’s more in building relationships with our federal partners, who, of course, work with their own stakeholders, so as situations arise and new adaptations of existing legislation come to light we have a forum working with our federal partners to identify methods and approaches solve those questions.”
Part of that forum’s mission includes addressing the privacy hurdles of information sharing, which are outlined in the strategic plan’s Objective 4B. Wyatt said that the privacy objectives built into the strategic plan serve as an example of how federal agencies will continue to work on the issues as they arise.
“The strategic plan and the relationships we are continuing to build open that forum to discuss, ‘How can we address this, what type of education might be necessary, where might we need to provide more guidance to the public or providers?’”
Overall, the strategic plan provides not just a framework, but what Wyatt called a series of federal levers that will allow agencies and partners to adjust regulation and policy to adapt to the continually changing structure of IT.
“This is not something where we put out a plan and now it’s going to sit here on a shelf,” she said. “The idea is that we are going to continually work with our partners as the environment itself changes.”
