Committee shows hits, misses from stimulus law

Since passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act early last year, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has had its hands full doing what its name implies—stage managing a massive national health IT promotional production.

A meeting on April 28 of the Health Information Technology Standards Committee provided examples of federal actors both hitting and missing their marks. The committee was created under the stimulus law to advise the ONC. One section of the meeting dealt with a presentation by Doug Fridsma, acting director of the Office of Standards and Interoperability at the ONC, and Arien Malec, who is working at the ONC on development of a lightweight version of the proposed National Health Information Network called NHIN Direct. Malec is the coordinator of the project under an HHS contract with A+ Consulting. Malec is on a leave of absence from RelayHealth, a subsidiary of pharmaceutical wholesaler and health IT system vendor McKesson Corp., San Francisco.