At its final meeting — during which Chair Paul Egerman sought to put the finishing touches on its upcoming report to the HIT Policy Committee — some members of ONC’s PCAST Report Workgroup chafed at their narrow mandate of only suggesting ways the report’s principles could be integrated with Meaningful Use, not commenting on its […]
PCAST Workgroup Sees Little Chance for Major Stage 2 Strides
Because the industry lacks a standardized UEL message wrapper, there’s little chance CMS/ONC can inject significant PCAST-report principles into Stage 2 of its Meaningful Use incentive program, according to Stan Huff and Dixie Baker, both members of the PCAST Workgroup, a subgroup of ONC’s HIT Policy Committee. Workgroup Chair Paul Egerman, a retired software entrepreneur, […]
Privacy & Security Tiger Team Hunts Balance
The HIT Policy Committee’s new Privacy and Security Tiger Team workgroup is striving to establish the requirements that intermediaries in personal health information (PHI) message transactions will be subject to. Under HIPAA, parties which have access to PHI are deemed covered entities (CEs), required to establish business associate agreements (BAAs) which obligate them to handle the data in certain ways. With the rise of health information exchange under the HITECH Act, the Office of the National Coordinator created the Tiger Team to provide it with guidance in governing health information organizations (HIOs) — or third-party intermediaries which have varying degrees of involvement with the messages.