ONC head Micky Tripathi recently took part in two interviews.
ONC Coordinator Outlines New Vistas for Telehealth, Unblocked Health Records and Patient ID
Key takeaways:
“ONC is prepared to create rules to support any possible CMS actions that might support reimbursement for telehealth visits.
Video visits remain a workflow issue that may require ONC to specify appropriate EHR support.
The significant existing investment in existing patient matching systems may be weighed against the cost of adopting a possible national standard…”
“HL: What key technology challenges are hospitals and health systems facing related to telehealth, and how will ONC help?
Tripathi: I suspect that the key issues that they’re facing are workflow and integration challenges, which is to say that no one wants to be in two different systems. A patient may or may not care. If you’re on the patient side, you get a link, and you just click the link. You don’t know that it’s within the provider’s EHR system, or whether it’s a different system, as long as that physician is on the other end when you click the link, that’s all you really care about…” Read the full article here.
Source: ONC Coordinator Outlines New Vistas for Telehealth, Unblocked Health Records and Patient ID – By Scott Mace, April 27, 2021. HealthLeaders.
HIStalk Interviews Micky Tripathi, National Coordinator for Health IT (Part 1)
“Within HHS alone, CMS creates and consumes a lot of data, FDA is looking at real-world evidence and post-marketing surveillance, and CDC has data-driven public health activities. Is there a big table where all of HHS’s groups figure out an overall HHS data strategy?
ONC chairs the Federal Health IT Coordinating Council, which brings together all the federal partners who have health IT activities going on. The last time I looked, that was probably 30 to 40 federal agencies across the government participating. I’m trying to energize that so that it has focus on particular topic areas where we can make forward movement. That’s a place we can exercise a little bit more to get more coordination.
Some of it is just reaching out and having bilateral conversations, figuring out where there’s a connection of dots to say, wait a minute, I just heard the same thing from four different agencies. Let’s try to get them together and start to think about how we’re going to think about this together…” Read the full interview here.
Source: HIStalk Interviews Micky Tripathi, National Coordinator for Health IT (Part 1) – April 26, 2021. HIStalk.
