“What are some of the key healthcare IT policy and public health priorities that senior federal government officials are pursuing right now? On Tuesday, Aug. 10 during HIMSS21, sponsored by the Chicago-based Healthcare Information & Management Systems Society, and being held this week at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, National Coordinator for Health IT Micky Tripathi, Ph.D., M.P.P., and Daniel Jernigan, M.D., M.P.H., Deputy Director for Public Health Science and Surveillance (DDPHS) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), answered questions posed by HIMSS president and CEO Hal Wolf and HIMSS’s senior vice president of government relations Tom Leary, during a session entitled “Answering the Call: The Importance of Interoperability Across the Spectrum in the Age of COVID-19 and Beyond.” HIMSS’s Wolf and Leary appeared in person, while Tripathi and Jernigan appeared remotely during the session.”
“After making some opening remarks, HIMSS’s Wolf asked National Coordinator Tripathi to share some broad comments about the top policy goals of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), and how Tripathi sees the landscape around interoperability and public health right now…”
“’As an industry,’ Tripathi said, ‘we stand at one of those very pivotal moments in time where policy, culture, and circumstances’ have all led us to a place of challenge and opportunity. ‘We’ve spent more than $40 billion in public investments and much more in private investments, laying the foundation for hospitals and doctors to work with information systems,’ he said. ‘But I think we would all agree that we didn’t do all that work simply to achieve more efficient billing’ on the part of providers. ‘And the COVID-19 pandemic, as tragic as it has been, has also done us a service in terms of pressure-testing the system,’ with regard to how the system of electronic health records (EHRs), coupled with other information systems and networks, has been able to respond to the public health emergency of the past year-and-a-half in the United States.”
“Fundamentally, Tripathi said, ‘now that we’ve got a foundation of EHRs in place,’ it is imperative that EHRs and all forms of clinical information systems support the development of data and information superstructures that can “help us identify inequities in healthcare and address those…'” Read the full article here.
Source: At HIMSS21, Micky Tripathi Outlines—and Explains—ONC’s Top Policy Priorities – By Mark Hagland, August 10, 2021. Healthcare Innovation.
