ONC and the feds

The Office of Management and Budget and the Health and Human Services Department late last month called for the creation of a government-wide task force to help coordinate health IT planning among federal agencies.

The idea is to gather the senior-most health information executives from high impact health agencies—Defense, Social Security, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture and Commerce – once or twice a month to synchronize health IT plans with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.

The meetings would be chaired by Dr. David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health IT.

So far, so good. As the proposal from HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius and OMB director Peter Orszag points out, federal agency health IT coordination has become mostly ad hoc since the advent of the HITECH Act, which set up the administration’s $20 billion health IT incentive plan.

Mostly overlooked in the choice of HITECH funding targets and overshadowed by the sheer effort required to set the plan in motion, federal agencies have nonetheless pursued their individual health IT business goals.

With a small pot of HITECH funding, SSA has expanded health information exchange joint ventures with state level network providers. The VA has followed suit, announcing the first in a series of community- based projects to share health records with commercial healthcare players.

Once these and similar efforts are on ONC’s regular docket and federal task force members become more visible around ONC, such coordination may turn into collaboration.

The SSA has a lot of experience with multi-level HIE that might benefit the VA in its HIE planning. The task force could make sure such possibilities are at least on its check list.

To help make sure they are, Sebelius and Orszag also proposed that three White House officers join the task force as vice-chairs: federal chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra; federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra; and OMB health program associate director, Keith Fontenot.

This may be the first time in the short history of the ONC that the national coordinator has held a regular meeting with the White House’s senior IT and budget leaders, together with agency health IT leads.

But today the stakes are high. All the federal health IT movers and shakers, from the White House on down, should be in the room. That lowers the risk of failure and gives patients the best odds for getting the best return on their tax dollar.