Vish Sankaran, the director of the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) program, which helped pioneer a working version of a nationwide health information network (NHIN), announced his resignation from the Office of National Coordinator for Health IT today.
Sankaran managed the FHA program from its inception in 2005, overseeing production of the "Connect" gateway, a Web portal incorporating standards and services for helping large healthcare providers and agencies share health data securely over the Internet.
Connect was launched as a combined effort of 20 federal agencies, ranging from the Defense Department to the Railroad Retirement Board, interested in finding a standard, efficient way to share health information between agencies and with the public.
"FHA has matured and has a good structure," Sankaran said. "The agencies have come together, and I feel my role has been its establishment and not in day-to-day operations." He did not provide details about his plans but said he hopes to continue to be involved "in the national effort to make health and human services a transformative agent for our society."
Currently, the Social Security Administration and the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense exchange health information with private health providers via Connect software. A number of state and local government agencies and community healthcare organizations are also piloting health information sharing with the software.
The recent adopters were beneficiaries of ONC's decision last Spring to drop Connect's code into the open source community, which since then has been tweaking the software to make it more stable and easier to use.
The next two releases, scheduled for July and September, will allow healthcare providers, agencies and health information exchanges to tap cloud computing services to support Connect, which offers messaging, patient discovery and a provider look-up features. Cloud services takes advantage of computing power and storage capacity to supply business services on an as-needed basis.
Sankaran said the Connect project has been a model for how government can approach business problems without picking winners or dictating outcomes. Among the FHA program's accomplishments, he said, has been "bringing people together in an ecosystem where the government's role is to enable collaboration and then to move on and let industry drive it forward."
Sankaran's departure comes at a time when FHA "is reshaping itself," he said in an email. The program's new leadership will have to decide the roles and responsibilities for FHA, he said. That includes whether FHA will extend its work beyond the adoption of electronic health records and information exchange into the realm of health reform.
"I feel that FHA should play a role in not just building solutions but looking for solutions that are going to control the cost and improve the quality of service to the citizen," he said. "Health information exchange is one such product, but HIE alone is not going to really make a difference on the bottom line."
Dr. Theresa Cullen, chief information officer of the Indian Health Service, a FHA member, said Sankaran "embodies visionary leadership with ceaseless energy and a commitment to improving health outcomes." His interpersonal skills and commitment to ensuring that "everyone was at the table" made FHA a critical factor in advancing the national health IT agenda, she said.
"His recent proposal to expand the essential components of health data sharing into the realm of health and human service data sharing at the state and community level are essential to advancing the next level of health equity," she added.
Prior to coming to the ONC, Sankaran was the director of IT and product operations at CareScience Inc, a healthcare application service provider. The firm's chief executive officer, Dr. David Brailer, was later named the first national coordinator of health IT.
