The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) is maintaining its focus on information blocking, interoperability, and coordination between federal agencies, according to Micky Tripathi, national coordinator for health IT.
“We built this foundation of EHR systems and we are now able to pause and ask the question ‘what is it that we want to do with these systems now?” Tripathi posited at the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) 2021 Conference.
“There is still hard work to do and there are still adoption issues in parts of the healthcare delivery system that haven’t benefited directly from the federal government incentives,” Tripathi said. “But in terms of hospitals and the ambulatory side, they were able to benefit from those incentive programs and do the hard work of implementation.”
At the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) 2021 Conference, Head of the ONC Micky Tripathi challenged the Healthcare industry to “jump ahead” to do great things with EHR systems.
“We’ve spent a lot of time getting EHR systems to do the basic things, such as core clinical documentation, core clinical documentation to support payment, and medical records,” said Tripathi. “Those are important functions, but they are baseline functions.”
“We need to do all of the hard work now and change the fundamental attitude toward sharing information with patients, as well as other authorized parties that are involved in the care of patients,” Tripathi said.
ONC is collaborating with the Office of Inspector General (OIG) to help define and implement information blocking enforcement.
“It’s a multi-party collaborative approach,” Tripathi said. “ONC constructs the policy and OIG takes care of the enforcement.”
Tripathi said ONC continues to work on TEFCA and advance interoperability through nationwide networks, working in conjunction with State and regional Health Information Exchanges (HIEs). “With TEFCA, we do not want to inhibit that, but we are working to figure out how TEFCA leverages what’s been done today and how it can take us to the next level,” said the ONC Leader. “Also, we need to give the industry a good timeline for TEFCA, which we haven’t done yet, but we are working hard toward that.”
Tripathi said ONC needs to figure out how to open up interoperability to include other use cases. “That’s a lot of activity,” he stated, “CareQuality does upward of five million transactions per day, but unfortunately, that’s not extending out toward payers to participate or public health to participate or patients to directly participate in that. That’s what we want TEFCA to be an enabler of going forward so we have a much better roadmap for what nationwide interoperability looks like regardless of which network you’re on.”
Tripathi said that he and other leaders are working to improve coordination between all of appropriate federal agencies. “There’s growing interest from a number of industries, which is a blessing and a curse,” Tripathi said. “The good news is they are very interested, and the bad news is that they are very interested. We are spending a lot of time working with other agencies to identify the use cases, business needs, and goals. We also have to leverage the standards-based approaches that we’ve put into the market to help those federal agencies achieve what they want to achieve.”