Priorities to accelerate workflow automation in health care.

Inefficient workflows affect many health care stakeholders including patients, caregivers, clinicians, and staff. Widespread health information technology adoption and modern computing provide opportunities for more efficient health care workflows through automation. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) led a multidisciplinary effort with stakeholders across health care and experts in industrial engineering, computer science, and finance to explore opportunities for automation in health care.

Gender harmony: improved standards to support affirmative care of gender-marginalized people through inclusive gender and sex representation.

Objective: Accurate representation of clinical sex and gender identity in interoperable clinical systems is a major challenge for organizations intent on improving outcomes for sex- and gender-marginalized people. Improved data collection has been hindered by the historical approach that presumed a single, often binary, datum was sufficient. We describe the Health Level Seven International (HL7) Gender Harmony logical model that proposes an improved approach.

Validation and Testing of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources Standards Compliance: Data Analysis.

Background: There is wide recognition that the lack of health data interoperability has significant impacts. Traditionally, health data standards are complex and test-driven methods played important roles in achieving interoperability. The Health Level Seven International (HL7) standard Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) may be a technical solution that aligns with policy, but systems need to be validated and tested.

HITECH spurs EHR vendor competition and innovation, resulting in increased adoption.

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act was enacted to increase electronic health record (EHR) adoption by providers and hospitals. Experts expressed skepticism about whether the program would indeed hasten adoption and could be implemented in time for the initial reporting period. Could EHR vendors meet the certification requirements, and could the industry innovate to meet small-practice needs? This study, in addition to documenting increased provider adoption, provides the first evidence of increased competitiveness and innovation in the EHR industry spurred by HITECH.

E-prescribing adoption and use increased substantially following the start of a federal incentive program.

E-prescribing, or the electronic generation of a prescription and its routing to a pharmacy, is generally believed to improve health care quality and reduce costs. However, physicians were slow to embrace this technology until 2008, when Congress authorized e-prescribing incentives as part of the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act. Using e-prescribing data from Surescripts, we determined that as of December 2010, close to 40 percent of active e-prescribers had adopted the technology in response to the federal incentive program.