No time for pause and reflection

Mary Stevens, Editor

December’s news ticker has been as busy as holiday season at the mall. This week saw the arrival of two additional ONC Authorized Testing and Certification Bodies, bringing to five the number of entities authorized to certify EHRs and modules that pass muster for meaningful use; six of the leading healthcare organizations in the U.S. announced plans to collaborate to develop and disseminate best practices for chronic, expensive conditions; and a two-day ONC Update gathering in Washington, D.C., cited federal policy and standards progress, connecting some of the dots in between.

And that was just through Wednesday.

What’s ahead? Not much in the way of pauses and reflection, by the look of things. At the ONC event, for example, Joy Pritts, the ONC’s Chief Privacy Officer, talked about the work to be done when it comes to privacy and security.

People need policy direction on how to manage consent for participating in an exchange. The Health IT Policy Committee’s security tiger team recommended that patients be able to exercise consent on a one-time basis, but that shouldn’t be a substitute for other privacy safeguards, she said. This is a relatively simple statement to guide future policies, but the technological framework to back it up will take a lot more hammering.

Likewise, safeguarding patient information throughout an exchange is an IT challenge of big proportions. Private companies, governmental and open source entities have developed data segmentation and other technologies that can protect health information, but their approaches are not quite ready for widespread adoption and more testing is needed, she said.

Deliberation also continues on patient identification—including the problems of matching information to the correct patient. “This is a problem at the [single] organizational level, let alone across different entities, and the committee is looking at what other industries do,” said Pritts.

Not a minute too soon. Of 3.6 million adults visiting an acute care site during a five-year period, almost a third sought care at two or more hospitals, according to an article in the Dec. 13/27 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine. This situation won’t be confined to acute care settings. Clinicians in all settings will need secure, authenticated and available information to adequately care for their increasingly “mobile” patients.

As Pritts’ office, the Direct Project and others work on the challenges this presents, the news queue is likely going to stay full. Call it the gift that keeps on giving for health IT news outlets.

Mary Stevens
Editor of CMIO

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