HLN’s Noam Arzt and Michael Suralik attended the tenth ONC Annual Meeting held on January 27-28 in Washington, DC. More than 1,200 individuals attended in person supplemented by remote attendees for the plenary sessions. Throughout the two-day event, ONC provided interesting speakers, engaging panels on a variety of topics, and ample time to network with colleagues and friends.
In December 2019 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released a draft 2020-2025 Federal Health IT Strategic Plan and invited public comment. The plan is intended not only to provide a roadmap to Federal agencies but also to “…provide signals to the private sector on the direction of the federal government, which may guide coordination and investment decisions” and serve as a “catalyst for activities” (p. 21)
We have spent years involved with the management of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Electronic Health Records (EHR) Incentive Programs which were created by the HITECH Act (2009). These programs were recently renamed Promoting Interoperability (PI) programs. In a nutshell, these programs were tied to the Medicare and Medicaid insurance programs and provided financial incentives over a number of years to ambulatory providers and hospitals to adopt and use EHRs. Vendors submitted their technology products for testing and certification that they performed specific functions and could exchange data using specified message formats.
On December 5, 2019, Michael Suralik, project manager at HLN, attended The Sequoia Project’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. TEFCA and Information Blocking were the big topics of the day. It was a very substantive meeting and there was vibrant back and forth discussion and exchange of ideas between and among the presenters and the other meeting participants (see this report that summarizes the meeting).
Last week, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released the final report from its Patient Matching, Aggregation, and Linking (PMAL) Project, as well as an additional report describing a pilot project to test the Patient Demographic Data Quality Framework (PDDQ) to Support Patient Matching that was released several years ago. Funded from June 2015 through September 2018 by the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) through the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) Trust Fund, PMAL was one of the activities I described in an earlier blog entry.
The Final Report reviews the four challenged of patient matching and linking that the PMAL project attempted to address: