“The Office of National Coordinator for Health IT released Monday a strategy to better leverage health IT and data in research activities over the next three to five years.”
“The strategy, known as the National Health IT Priorities for Research, states that despite the growing adoption of electronic health records and boom in health data availability, challenges around data quality and consistency, data access policies and governance, limited research tool development and inconsistencies across technical architectures make capitalizing on health IT and data for research difficult.”
“ONC reviewed research documents, interviewed relevant experts on EHRs and best health IT architecture for supporting research, and also held a workshop in July 2018 to identify these challenges. Through this work, ONC also found that a lack of opportunities for the use of health IT infrastructure for research, tools for researchers to learn how to use and share standardized EHR data and a slew of other obstacles.”
“To overcome these challenges, ONC drafted in its agenda two overall goals — to leverage high-quality electronic health data for research and to advance a health IT infrastructure to support research. Under these two goals are nine priorities, which ONC will enforce over the next three to five years.”
“The first goal focuses on optimizing high-quality health data for research amid preexisting complications of lack of data standards and data compatibility for research. The three priorities include…”
“While these priorities will help ONC create standards for and the security and interoperability of health data, the following support the second goal of developing a research-ready health IT architecture. The priorities under this goal are to…” Read the full article here.
Source: ONC Strategizes Health Data, IT Infrastructure Improvements for Research – By Melissa Harris, February 24, 2020. GovernmentCIO.
