“During a Tuesday evening Views from the Top session at HIMSS22, National Coordinator for Health IT Micky Tripathi shared the stage with Dr. Daniel Jernigan, deputy director for public health science and surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
“The topic was how the nationwide data exchange system can be shored-up and streamlined to enable more seamless and robust information-sharing with public health agencies – and ease the burden on healthcare providers.”
“The patchwork data reporting systems and strategies deployed in the U.S. as the novel coronavirus first spread two years ago were adequate in some respects. But clearly many of them – cobbled together on an ad hoc basis, often relying on phone and fax – left much room for improvement.”
“‘It was really clear during those first moments of the pandemic response how unprepared we were,’ said Jernigan. ‘There were lots of reasons why we weren’t. It was not something that just came up at that time, but it was something that had been developing for a number of years prior to that. For many years, we’ve been developing these siloed systems that didn’t speak with one another and could not scale…'”
“‘Public health is just not a part of the healthcare ecosystem,’ said Jernigan. ‘So as things were improving [for providers 10 years ago] with meaningful use, the public health partners, we’re just not a part of that – and now we’re having to work pretty hard to get back into that healthcare ecosystem.'”
“It’s a longstanding problem, he said. But the good news is ‘there are a lot of great efforts that are coming up that are going to help us to address that problem.'”
“Pulling forward to the ‘next level’
A major enabler of those new efforts will be the recently-opened Trusted Exchange Framework of Common Agreement, said Tripathi, who used the talk to highlight TEFCA and other projects ONC is doing with respect to ‘a whole bunch of different things in the area of standards and data quality’ with a firm focus on the public health domain.”
“‘We’re pulling all of those levers in the direction of public health towards what we’re calling ‘North Star’ architecture,’ he said…” Read the full article here.
Source: National Coordinator: TEFCA will enable ‘North Star’ architecture for public health – By Mike Miliard, March 16, 2022. Healthcare IT News.
