Federal officials are asking the public to plug into upcoming discussions of Meaningful Use definitions, but the request comes at a time when it’s still not clear how much the general public actually knows about the subject of HIT.
Writing on ONC’s Federal Advisory Committee (FACA) blog, Joshua Seidman, PhD, Acting Director of ONC’s Meaningful Use program, announced that the HIT Policy Committee’s Meaningful Use Workgroup “will be holding a series of public hearings over the next several months to inform its recommendations for Stages 2 and 3 MU definitions. The first of these hearings focuses specifically on the patient/family engagement domain and will be held April 20.”
In view of the ever-expanding role of HIT in patients’ lives, Seidman says that ONC and the MU Workgroup “really want to know more about the meaningful use of HIT in the real lives of patients and families. We will explore how patient-generated data can be incorporated into the meaningful use of EHRs. We also need to address the policy challenges and infrastructure required to support patients’ and families’ meaningful use of HIT. This information will help us to develop a long-term framework for the evolution of HIT applications to facilitate patient and family engagement.”
The desire to engage the public makes perfect sense, but it seems to us that HHS and ONC still need to develop an overall plan for how to engage the public in these discussions.
After all, it remains unclear (PDF) how much the public knows about HIT and related issues, a problem which HHS seems to recognize given that it just hired a PR firm for a two-year public education project. Moreover, while Mr. Seidman cites the recent California HealthCare Foundation report that points to the tangible benefits gained by patients who have electronic access to their personal health information, the fact is that only a small percentage of the population is effectively plugged in.
In short, it seems safe to assume that while healthcare stakeholders and observers are more than familiar with the HIT landscape, much of the general public still is not.
If that is indeed the case, both policymakers and the public would benefit if officials took the time to find out what the public does and doesn’t know about HIT, then figured out how best to fill the gaps.
Jeff Rowe blogs daily at Priming the Pump.
