Scott Young | The next steps for a national health IT infrastructure

GCN staff writer Mary Mosquera moderated an online forum about federal efforts to jump-start development of a national health IT infrastructure. The guest was Scott Young, M.D., director for health information technology at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a division of the Health and Human Services Department. Dr. Young answered questions about how the government is working in collaboration with industry to establish standards for interoperability. This standards effort will improve the ability of physicians and hospitals to exchange patient data and improve the quality of care and reduce medical mistakes.$qna_responses = array();//row$qna_responses[] = " Welcome and thank you for participating in GCN's online forum. Dr. Scott Young, director for health information technology at HHS' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, has joined us to answer your questions about the next steps by the federal government toward a national health IT infrastructure. Let's get started.response_line/response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " Given the health care continuity issues brought out by Katrina, are there national health IT infrastructure contingency plans for providing health care and patient record access without the availability of the Internet? Has any thought been given to patient data traveling with patients rather than patient data being stored on centralized servers that may not always be readily accessible?response_line /response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " response_line Chris, HIPAA regulations also require doctors, hospitals, and other groups to protect and secure medical data. Despite the concern over data files being mishandled, paper files have perhaps a greater opportunity to be misused./response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " response_line /response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " How does national health IT infrastructure comply with HIPAA?response_line Joe, all health care activities need to comply with applicable federal, state and local laws and regualtions./response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " response_line Dr. Zhou, AHRQ works closely with the Office of National Coordinator for Health IT. We look forward to continuing with that strong relationship. The office will be physically located in Washington, D.C./response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " Could you talk about some of the financial incentives that the government will be offering for small physician practices to adopt the standards of EHR?response_line /response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " How will VA and DOD work together as part of the national infrastructure to set standards?response_line Daniel, VA and DOD are also part of the public/private organization that HHS formed to decide on standards for interoperability and early use cases for health IT. Yesterday, HHS listed the 16 members of that group, the American Health Information Community, and it includes VA and DOD./response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " Can you describe a couple of AHRQ's health IT demonstration projects that you think could help bring about a national health IT network?response_line /response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " AHRQ Patient Safety Initiatives...How will those initiatives fold into the NHIN Infrastructure?response_line Wanda, the , which is made up of public and private members, including representatives of several federal agencies, will weigh standards, best practices and early uses that have been tried or come out of the experience of agencies like AHRQ, and also local and regional health IT networks under development now and contracts that HHS will award over the next several weeks. Those contracts will develop a process to harmonize standards, design prototypes for a health IT infrastructure, certify products for interoperability standards compliance and assess the variations of state privacy laws. /response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " There are a plethoria of existing IT standards for health that are not interoperable or international. It also seems that some standards activities are driven by individuals with conflicts of interests. What if anything will be done to harmonize these standards and eliminate the "not created in my backyard" syndrome?response_line /response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " Will Section 508 Standards be considered for interoperability, and how will testing for compliance be implemented?response_line /response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " What initiatives can the rural community health organziations implement now in order to jump start the NHIN program?response_line /response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " Can health IT include the statusof health with statistics of each state & city in USA?response_line Health IT can allow a signifcant breadth of deidentified data to be available for evaluation. The challenges are many fold including provisions for protecting individually identifiable data. G.K., You bring up another benefit to health IT when data is de-identified and can be exchanged. Health IT will allow for timely public health information in the case of potential pandemics or bio-terrorism events. Symptoms gathered from emergency rooms across the country can be shared so public health officials can determine the seriousness or not and the course of action./response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " Scott, In response to Chris's questions, you indicated "HHS will be awarding a series of contracts to help inform the Department regarding the challenges and potential solutions involved in the creation of such a system." What is the time frame when RFP's for these contracts will become available and where is the best place to become aware of the existance of such RFPs?response_line /response_line";//$qna_responses[] = " Our time is up. Thank you, Scott, for sharing the work of AHRQ in advancing health IT. And thank you all for submitting your questions; unfortunately, time constraints prevented us from answering them all. Stay tuned for future GCN forums.response_line/response_line";///row$total_responses = count($qna_responses);if ($forum_state == "active") {