Hi all, I look forward to meeting with you all tomorrow Thursday June 1st ET for our discussion on ChatGPT and Cybersecurity. Also, this past week I had the opportunity to attend the ASTHO TECHXPO 2023 in Chicago. I wanted to take a second to recap some of the highlights I had from the conference in relation to our group.
In one of the more relevant sessions, ASTHO reviewed a breakdown of the most current TEFCA architecture, which we shared earlier this month. The new recommendations further define the flow of information:
-
HHS/ONC policies will provide overall oversight to non-profit partners (RCE) that provide operational oversight and governance for Qualified Health Information Networks (QHINS).
-
These QHINS will connect directly to each other to facilitate nationwide interoperability.
-
Then each QHIN will connect with each participant who can connect to sub-participants.
This was all a part of a more in-depth plan to identify what data modernization means to health departments that use EHR systems and are working in epidemiology. The overall theme of the conference was calling for more standardization in the field to help systems better communicate between one another. Also, by creating policies and operational oversight by the ONC on certified systems, it will allow for better/safer sharing of data from different entities without running into as many legal concerns.
Also, I'm still new to health IT, so learning about the legal implications of sharing data and why most of the time data sharing is prohibited was particularly interesting.
Overall, it was a good conference, but it only touched on what data modernization means to the field of epidemiology and did not address or define what data modernization was as a whole.
------------------------------
Joey O'Bryhim
National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO)
Washington DC
(703)785-8118
------------------------------