HLN Consulting, LLC – Innovators in Public Health Informatics

HHS Releases Landmark Report: Reforming America’s Healthcare System

by Noam Arzton January 6, 2019

On December 3, 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an extensive, 120-page report on the administration’s proposals to reform the healthcare system. The report, titled Reforming America’s Healthcare System Through Choice and Competition, is divided into four major sections. The report that government policy of the last few years has suppressed competition, increased prices for healthcare, and limited choices for consumers. Though rich in detail as it tries to prove each of these points, the more than fifty recommendations are often broad and aspirational rather than practical.

Since I am not a health economist, I will leave the market issues to others to discuss (many of the ideas in this report have been vetted and discussed by others previously). But there are two sections of the report which make direct mention of Health IT.

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HLN Sponsors ISDS 2019 Annual Conference

by Noam Arzton January 2, 2019

HLN is pleased to be a Patron-level sponsor of the 18th Annual International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) Annual Meeting being held in San Diego, CA from January 30 – February 1, 2019. This conference expects to bring together more than 400 participants with over 220 presentations and ten workshops dedicated to the advancement of the science and practice of biosurveillance.

HLN will be attending the meeting with a table in the exhibit area as well as two presentations:

Strategies for Clinical Decision Support for Electronic Case Reporting, January 30, 10am PT

Automated Immunization Surveillance: Using Business Intelligence to Improve Up-to-Date Rates, with our colleagues from Denver Public Health, January 31, 2019 at 1pm PT

We look forward to see you all there in San Diego!

A Public Health Perspective ONC’s Strategy to Reduce Burden on Physicians

by Noam Arzton December 19, 2018

On November 28, 2018 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released a draft Strategy on Reducing Regulatory and Administrative Burden Relating to the Use of Health IT and EHRs for public comment. The strategy aims to reduce the time and effort and improve the functionality of electronic health records (EHRs) for clinicians, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations.

This strategy was developed primarily through the efforts of ONC-convened workgroups in response to requirements laid out by Congress in the 21st Century Cures Act (Section 13103). The report itself does not identify who exactly served on these workgroups and what organizations were represented.

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CDC Issues National Test Collaborative RFI

by Noam Arzton December 5, 2018

In October the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a Request for Information (RFI) for a Natural Test Collaborative (NTC). Through a series of questions, the RFI seeks opinions and information about “The development of a national testbed (notionally called the National Test Collaborative (NTC)) for real-world testing of health information technology (IT)” and “Approaches for creating a sustainable infrastructure” to achieve it. The scope of the questions is somewhat confusing and quite broad, starting with Clinical Decision Support (CDS) and electronic Clinical Quality Measures (eCQMs) but quickly expanding to Electronic Health Records (EHR) and interoperability (not precisely defined).

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Is the US Finally Ready to Get Serious About Biodefense?

by Noam Arzton November 19, 2018

Biological and other disaster threats – whether accidental, driven by forces of nature, or intentional – pose fairly grave risks to the United States and the world. Situational awareness has been a conspicuous topic ever since the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax scare that followed shortly thereafter. Since then we have experienced numerous disasters: health impacts of major weather events such as hurricanes and earthquakes, new virus outbreaks like Ebola in Africa, raging wildfires on the West Coast (I live in California), and the ever-present threat of pandemic flu which a hundred ago infected some 500 million people across the globe and killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, according to the Center for Disease Control and Preparedness (CDC).

But since the initial flurry of public health preparedness funds in the ensuing several years after the 9/11 attacks, this topic has not had a high priority at CDC nor the funding necessary to implement it successfully.

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