Electronic Health Records

May 11, 2009

Kaiser Permanente Executive Appointed to Federal Health IT Committee

Jamie Ferguson, Kaiser Permanente’s national executive director for health IT strategy and policy, has been named to a key committee advising the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about implementing electronic health records.

The HHS department’s Health IT Standards Committee will help establish a nationwide, interoperable health information technology infrastructure. Ferguson is among 23 health care executives on the advisory committee. Other members come from health care organizations such as Harvard Medical School, the Cleveland Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare, Geisinger Health System, and from other vendor and consumer organizations.

Ferguson recently answered a few questions about the purpose of the new committee, his role, and what he hopes the committee will achieve:

Q. What is the HIT Standards Committee?

Ferguson: The HIT Standards Committee is one of two federal advisory committees established in the recent American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to aid adoption of health IT. There is a Policy Committee and a Standards Committee; this is the Standards Committee. It operates under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and it reports to the national coordinator for health IT in the Office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Q. What is the purpose and role of the committee?

Ferguson: The committee will help establish the nationwide infrastructure of interoperable health information that is needed to achieve the relevant goals of the ARRA, improving the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of care. Specifically, the committee will advise on health information standards, implementation specifications, and health IT certification criteria in pursuit of these goals. The role of the committee in this regard is to develop, harmonize, recognize and recommend the standards and certification criteria. The committee also will provide for the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology to establish an effective, nationwide testing capability related to the practical use of these standards in the health care sector.

Q. Why does this committee matter?

Ferguson: As Secretary (Kathleen) Sebelius told the House Ways and Means Committee, to achieve the goals of ARRA and any meaningful health reform, it is not enough to help with acquisition of modern health care information technology. Health information must become electronically interoperable, meaning that as it moves from one provider to another and from one care setting to another, the information must be consistently understandable and actionable in the appropriate clinical context, regardless of who the authorized providers of care are or what system choices they made to best fit their practice. The work of this committee is critical because it will make this kind of interoperability real through its work on standards, certification criteria and testing.