Healthcare Privacy & Security Part of ONC Vision Paper

Healthcare privacy and security issues are part of several topics that the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) plans to focus on over the next decade. Yesterday the ONC released an outline of its new whitepaper describing its 10-year vision for advancing health IT capabilities and work toward an interoperable health IT infrastructure.

Titled “Health IT Enabled Quality Improvement: A Vision to Achieve Better Health and Health Care,” the white paper explained that there are five interdependent building blocks for a nationwide, interoperable health information infrastructure. They are:

“As we move forward, leveraging health IT adoption and improving the exchange of health information through the use of health IT will be integral to supporting the essential building blocks of a quality improvement (QI) ecosystem,” the white paper said. “The main goals of health IT adoption are to achieve improved health and health care quality, safety, and communication among all members of the care team while decreasing costs and increasing value.”

Protecting healthcare privacy and security are part of the ONC’s set of core principles. As health and healthcare data become more interoperable and multi-purposed for quality improvement activities, the ONC said it will “strive to ensure that appropriate, strong and effective privacy and security safeguards are in place.”

Moreover, the agency explained that it is going to support greater transparency and responsibility for individuals when it comes to entities that use their data. In particular, those that are not covered by Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) and the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules will see greater transparency.

Structured data and interoperability help facilitate big data, according to the ONC, which provides the potential for substantial benefits to individuals and society. However, the agency recognized that this creates potential healthcare privacy and security dangers.

“Patient-generated data will also continue to grow exponentially and be of equal value and potential risk,” the white paper said. “ONC will strive to ensure that privacy and security related policies, practices, and technology stay in front of the risks while not stifling data sharing and innovation. We will work closely with privacy and security experts in the federal and private sectors to ensure we address risks and prevent harm while ensuring our policies enable the necessary and desired level of data sharing for providing and improving the quality of care.”

The white paper heavily referred to its interoperability road map, which is expected to be released in January 2015 and follows the ONC’s original road map.

Overall, the ONC plans to will work with its federal partners to ensure that its health IT quality improvement efforts help all stakeholders fulfill the Department of Health and Human Services National Quality Strategy and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services quality strategy.

Just last month, the ONC published a report to Congress that touched upon evidence of progress of a nationwide system, adoption barriers and specific federal actions to reduce those barriers. In that report, the ONC also delved into the HIPAA Privacy Rule and HIPAA Security Rule by defining covered entities and business associates (BAs) and offering some recent Office for Civil Rights (OCR) enforcement statistics.