The American Medical Informatics Association expressed support for the draft federal health IT research and development framework laid out by the U.S. Networking and Information Technology Research and Development's National Coordination Office in a June 28 letter to the office's director, Bryan Biegel, PhD.
The NCO released its draft of the Federal Health Information Technology Research and Development Strategic Framework in May. The framework is meant to help federal agencies coordinate health IT research and development, promote health IT investment and articulate health IT policy needs.
While AMIA says it "strongly supports" the framework, the association, comprised of more than 5,400 informatics professionals, notes the framework doesn't include the term "informatics," thereby "overlooking the founding discipline responsible for health IT research and development." The letter asks the NCO to integrate these clinical concepts into the final version of the framework, to enable its "vision to become reality."
Here are the AMIA's four recommendations to the NCO's federal health IT R&D framework.
1. Agencies should prioritize the use of data to improve healthcare safety, reliability and quality.
2. AMIA urges federal agencies to prioritize widespread interoperability research, since interoperability testing is a prerequisite to interoperable systems.
3. Federal agencies should support the training of healthcare professionals and leaders in basic, applied and advanced informatics.
4. Innovative health IT products, like mHealth, are not yet regulated. AMIA recommends agencies focus on policy development as well as technology development.
Click here to read the full letter.
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