The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) issued its Annual Report for Fiscal Year 2023 along with a more lengthy appendix of supplemental background information in February 2024. This annual report is required by the 21st Century Cures Act.
The mail Annual Report document covers some useful areas, including:
- A set of forward-looking “illustrative stories” that highlight how health IT and interoperability can improve the healthcare experience and landscape in the future.
- A detailed table of health IT infrastructure gaps, opportunities, and recommendations. Some that are noteworthy in their relevance to public health specifically include:
- Gaps in Infrastructure and Standards to Support Data Sharing for Public Health Purposes, including recommendations to host a listening session on this topic, and an invitation to the TEFCA RCE to meet with the Committee to discuss the emerging public health use cases.
- Information blocking – registries, which recognizes the confusion in the public health ecosystem about whether information blocking rules apply to public health registries in any way and requests additional federal guidance in this area.
- Standards to Support Data Linking and Patient Matching, which seems to come up every year, and the desire for a national strategy especially as the TEFCA network emerges.
- A summary of HITAC activities for the year, including its active workgroups, comments on the ONC HTI-1 proposed rule, and the 2022 Public Health Data Systems Task Force.
- A list of benchmarks established by ONC for the advisory committee.
A second document provides useful supplemental background information on all of the topics discussed in the annual report, including use of technologies that support public health. The treatment of this topic is fairly cursory, focusing more on gaps in the surveillance landscape than particular technical deficiencies in public health systems or interoperability. A wealth of footnotes makes this document a worthwhile resource.