Committee wants to recast NHIN as set of policies

The Nationwide Health Information Network should be recast as a set of policies and standards to facilitate exchange of health data rather than a physical network connecting databases, a federal advisory committee says.

The Health IT Policy Committee is pushing for the new definition and focus to help healthcare providers meet the short deadlines for achieving meaningful use of health IT. Instead of serving as a "medical Internet" of sorts--as former national health IT coordinator Dr. David Brailer said nearly six years ago--the NHIN should describe a basic set of services that facilitate meaningful use, the committee said last week. Such services should concentrate on electronic directories, policies for authenticating information and users, moving data in a secure manner over the public Internet, authentication and on simple "push" transactions that send messages to specific users, Government Health IT reports.

"There are hundreds of thousands of people who need to be accessible to this information exchange process, and we don't know where they all are," David Lansky, chairman of the HIT Policy Committee's NHIN workgroup, said Wednesday at a public meeting. "We don't know how to talk with their EHRs and find them with confidence."

For more on this significant policy change:
- read this Government Health IT story

Related Articles:
Blumenthal wants 'meaningful use' standards to work with NHIN
Dialing back the expectations for interoperable EHRs

Post a comment