<ed.note>John Casillas testified today before the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) American Health Information Community concerning the medical banking vision of a unified view and unified platform to connect EHR|PHR, real-time adjudication, Healthcare Savings Accounts, High Deductible Health Plans, Consumer Driven Healthcare. AHIC decided at its November 29, 2005 meeting to form workgroups in the following areas: biosurveillance, consumer empowerment, chronic care, and electronic health records. Subsequently, at the May 16, 2006 Community meeting, two additional groups were formed: the Biosurveillance Data Steering Group as a sub-workgroup within the Biosurveillance Workgroup (renamed Population Health and Clinical Care Connections Workgroup), and the Confidentiality, Privacy & Security Workgroup, which was created as a cross-cutting workgroup responsible for an issue relevant to all the workgroups. More recent, at the August 1, 2006, meeting, the Community formed the Quality Workgroup to address the need for the development of quality measures; and at the October 31, 2006, meeting, the Personalized Healthcare Workgroup was formed to develop and make recommendations on standards for interoperable integration of genomic test information into personal e-health records.</ed.note>
January/February 2005 Vol. 2, No. 1 The Medical Banking Report
Among the prominent rising stars for the 2008 presidency are Senator Bill Frist (R-TN), Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and former speaker of the house Newt Gingrinch. Have you noted that the most prominent common thread among them is healthcare technology?
<ed.note>I will, of course, be shocked, SHOCKED, if each of these folks waits until ‘o8 to actually do anything. They each have a perverse disincentive to solving the healthcare situation (or taking steps like investigating the role ebXML can play) before they can use it as a politcal issue in the election.</ed.note>
Few will forget Sen. Clinton’s work, as First Lady, to put together a healthcare agenda during the first few months of the Clinton presidency. The movement to implement "Community Health Information Networks" or "CHINs" was eventually cast off as another failed attempt to reform healthcare. Interestingly, there appears to be a rising analog today – the Regional Health Information Organization or "RHIO". Surely some would argue that the RHIO and CHIN are very different, which is a matter for another article.
