Move gradually on PCAST report recommendations: ONC work group
A work group of the federally chartered Health Information Technology Policy Committee concluded that it was feasible to move in the direction pointed to by a White House technology advisory council but that the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology should proceed by making incremental changes from its present technological course.
In December, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology issued a 108-page report that called on ONC to use its leverage to create and adopt a universal exchange language and use so-called meta-data tagging to facilitate records search and retrieval. The tags also could host privacy and security constraints that would follow the data from user to user. Dr. William Stead, associate vice chancellor for strategy and transformation and director of the Informatics Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, served as vice chairman of the work group appointed in January by then-ONC chief Dr. David Blumenthal. Stead, in presenting a draft of the letter at the April 13 policy committee meeting, summarized the work group's review in three points. One was that the PCAST report describes a nationwide use of advanced technology and provides “a compelling vision for how that technology could be beneficially used as an important aspect of the learning health system” advocated by the ONC's recently released national healthcare IT strategic plan. Another was that there are “major policy and operational feasibility concerns with the proposed technology.”
Move gradually on PCAST report recommendations: ONC work group