NHIN, privacy front and center at HIT policy meeting

More little tidbits leak out of HHS/ONC that tell the healthcare industry to WAIT!. They don’t say what is wrong or where things are going, but do indicate that the solution that experts from HIT Standards, HITSP, CCHIT, IHE, ISO, OASIS, HL7 and DICOM have developed is clearly wrong. Thus causing the whole healthcare industry to do NOTHING. This seems very counter productive. We have a very mature architecture based on open standards that have been specialized for healthcare only in the slightest.  I do not understand why a set of standards that have been vetted 3-5 times over in open consensus based organizations should be questioned once again by a PRIVATE group.

The head of federal efforts to boost the use of health information technology told members of an IT advisory panel Tuesday that they need to step back and take a second look at the proposed national health information network, and also come up with some advice on a national policy framework for IT privacy and security that makes sense. David Blumenthal, head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS, thanked members of the HIT Policy Committee for their achievements thus far. More

The later quote in the article is even more frustrating (bold added by me)…

Blumenthal said the ONC has been “working intensively on NHIN options” and would like to present them to a work group and the full HIT Policy Committee. “I’m not enough of a techie to know whether that qualifies as architecture,” Blumenthal said, “but it looks pretty to me, so maybe we can call it architecture.”