A new federal health IT advisory panel is at work on setting up a means of governing the nationwide health information network (NHIN) in a way that will earn the trust of healthcare providers and consumers and expand its use by the healthcare community.
There are no official rules of the road for the NHIN.
The recently established governance workgroup was chartered - not to set specific standards or policies - but to define a process for assuring secure information exchange, according to the workgroup's members.
"We can identify those areas impeding exchange nationwide and how best to address them in governance," said John Lumpkin, MD, chairman of the Health IT Policy Committee governance work group at its first meeting Sept. 3. The panel will make recommendations to the committee in October.
Lumpkin, who is also director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's healthcare group, said the panel would identify potential categories of governance, such as security, data integrity, identity management and symmetry of participation, where an entity sends and receives requests.
At a recent Health IT Policy Committee meeting, national health IT coordinator David Blumenthal, MD, acknowledged that governance can seem an abstract process. But developing rules of the road would provide "a referee or organizing force."
The work group will examine what might be governed in a centralized fashion - by a single entity for instance - and when ONC might participate in the process. "Ultimately we want to talk about the governance activities for which we think ONC needs to engage in," Lumpkin said.
Via the work group, the ONC also wants to hear from the health IT community on what to include in a formal rulemaking on governance planned for early next year.
To that end, the work group sketched plans to host information panels on Sept. 28 to hear from the banking and other industries that have established rules about exchanging trusted information. The work group also wants to explore lessons about interoperability, accountability and enforcement.
