HIT Policy and Standards Committees Commence Work on National Health Information Infrastructure HITSP

HIT Policy and Standards Committees Commence Work on National Health Information Infrastructure HITSP (Health Information Technology Standards) updated to the National eHealth Collaborative in early June 2009. Here are a few highlights:

HITSP has moved rapidly to focus on meaningful use and ARRA‘s 8 priorities:
1. Encourage technology that protects the privacy of health information
2. Nationwide health information technology infrastructure
3. Utilization of a certified electronic record for each person in the US by 2014
4. Technologies that support accounting of disclosures made by a covered entity
5. Electronic records to improve quality
6. Technologies that enable identifiable health information to be rendered unusable/unreadable
7. Demographic data collection : race, ethnicity, primary language, and gender
8. Technologies that address the needs of children and other vulnerable populations

HITSP has embraced a service-oriented architecture, which enables reuse of capabilities instead of requiring new value cases for each novel requirement. Initial services include:
• Issue Ambulatory Prescriptions
• Query for Medication History
• Communication of Structured Documents
• Communication of Unstructured Documents
• Clinical Referral Request
• Retrieval of Medical Knowledge
• Return Laboratory Results Message
• Communication of Laboratory Reports
• Communication of Imaging Information
• Quality Measures for Hospital based Quality Information Collection and Reporting
• Quality Measures for Clinician Quality Information Collection and Reporting
• Immunization Registry Update
• Immunization Registry Query
• Communication of Immunization Documents
• Vaccine and Drug Inventory Reporting
• Public Health Case Reporting
• Emergency Common Alerting
• Send and Receive Relevant BioSurveillance Data
• Communicate Resource Utilization
• Exchange Administrative Benefits/Eligibility Transactions
• Exchange Administrative Referral/Authorization Transactions
• Provider Directory

HITSP is moving to an electronic publication approach for all its implementation guidance.

HITSP has embraced USHIK as a repository for its harmonized standards and code sets

The July 15 deliverables will directly support the needs of the HIT Standards Committee and its workgroups to identify standards, implementation guidance, and certification criteria in support of meaningful use.

Michael F. Arrigo

Michael is Managing Partner & CEO of No World Borders, a leading healthcare management and IT consulting firm. He serves as an expert witness in Federal and State Court and was recently ruled as an expert by a 9th Circuit Federal Judge. He serves as a patent expert witness on intellectual property disputes, both as a Technical Expert and a Damages expert. His vision for the firm is to continue acquisition of skills and technology that support the intersection of clinical data and administrative health data where the eligibility for medically necessary care is determined. He leads a team that provides litigation consulting as well as advisory regarding medical coding, medical billing, medical bill review and HIPAA Privacy and Security best practices for healthcare clients, Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Records. He advises legal teams as an expert witness in HIPAA Privacy and Security, medical coding and billing and usual and customary cost of care, the Affordable Care Act and benefits enrollment, white collar crime, False Claims Act, Anti-Kickback, Stark Law, physician compensation, Insurance bad faith, payor-provider disputes, ERISA plan-third-party administrator disputes, third-party liability, and the Medicare Secondary Payer Act (MSPA) MMSEA Section 111 reporting. He uses these skills in disputes regarding the valuation of pharmaceuticals and drug costs and in the review and audit of pain management and opioid prescribers under state Standards and the Controlled Substances Act. He consults to venture capital and private equity firms on mHealth, Cloud Computing in Healthcare, and Software as a Service. He advises ERISA self-insured employers on cost of care and regulations. Arrigo was recently retained by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) regarding a significant false claims act investigation. He has provided opinions on over $1 billion in health care claims and due diligence on over $8 billion in healthcare mergers and acquisitions. Education: UC Irvine - Economics and Computer Science, University of Southern California - Business, studies at Stanford Medical School - Biomedical Informatics, studies at Harvard Medical School - Bioethics. Trained in over 10 medical specialties in medical billing and coding. Trained by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and PTAB Judges on patent statutes, rules and case law (as a non-attorney to better advise clients on Technical and Damages aspects of patent construction and claims). Mr. Arrigo has been interviewed quoted in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and National Public Radio, Fortune, KNX 1070 Radio, Kaiser Health News, NBC Television News, The Capitol Forum and other media outlets. See https://www.noworldborders.com/news/ and https://www.noworldborders.com/clients/ for more about the company.