HIT Policy and Standards Committees Commence Work on National Health Information Infrastructure HITSP

HIT Policy and Standards Committees Commence Work on National Health Information Infrastructure HITSP (Health Information Technology Standards) updated to the National eHealth Collaborative in early June 2009. Here are a few highlights:

HITSP has moved rapidly to focus on meaningful use and ARRA's 8 priorities:
1. Encourage technology that protects the privacy of health information
2. Nationwide health information technology infrastructure
3. Utilization of a certified electronic record for each person in the US by 2014
4. Technologies that support accounting of disclosures made by a covered entity
5. Electronic records to improve quality
6. Technologies that enable identifiable health information to be rendered unusable/unreadable
7. Demographic data collection : race, ethnicity, primary language, and gender
8. Technologies that address the needs of children and other vulnerable populations

HITSP has embraced a service-oriented architecture, which enables reuse of capabilities instead of requiring new value cases for each novel requirement. Initial services include:
• Issue Ambulatory Prescriptions
• Query for Medication History
• Communication of Structured Documents
• Communication of Unstructured Documents
• Clinical Referral Request
• Retrieval of Medical Knowledge
• Return Laboratory Results Message
• Communication of Laboratory Reports
• Communication of Imaging Information
• Quality Measures for Hospital based Quality Information Collection and Reporting
• Quality Measures for Clinician Quality Information Collection and Reporting
• Immunization Registry Update
• Immunization Registry Query
• Communication of Immunization Documents
• Vaccine and Drug Inventory Reporting
• Public Health Case Reporting
• Emergency Common Alerting
• Send and Receive Relevant BioSurveillance Data
• Communicate Resource Utilization
• Exchange Administrative Benefits/Eligibility Transactions
• Exchange Administrative Referral/Authorization Transactions
• Provider Directory

HITSP is moving to an electronic publication approach for all its implementation guidance.

HITSP has embraced USHIK as a repository for its harmonized standards and code sets

The July 15 deliverables will directly support the needs of the HIT Standards Committee and its workgroups to identify standards, implementation guidance, and certification criteria in support of meaningful use.