ATI assists national health care technology initiative

The Advanced Technology Institute, a Charleston-based nonprofit company affiliated with the South Carolina Research Authority, has been selected as part of a team to standardize health care information technology nationwide.

In October, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a contract award to support the national collaborative effort.

“This work will set the stage for an Internet-based architecture that will allow (for the) secure, timely and accurate exchange of health information among patients, clinicians and other authorized health care entities,” said Dr. David Brailer, the DHHS national coordinator for health information technology.

The American National Standards Institute, a nonprofit organization that promotes and facilitates the integrity of voluntary standardization and conformity assessment systems, was selected to lead the team supporting the initiative.

ANSI established the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel as an open forum where organizations in the health care community can collaborate to enable sharing of the information electronically. In January, the panel held its first meeting in Arlington, Va.

Besides ATI, the ANSI team includes the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society and Booz Allen Hamilton as strategic partners, along with 14 small businesses and research institutions.

More than 100 organizations representing standards development organizations, health care providers, public health agencies, consumers and government agencies have joined the panel.

“The members of that panel are contributing heavily to the development of standards,” said Jack Corley, ATI’s chief technology officer and deputy program manager for the initiative. “Hundreds of volunteers are devoting thousands of hours to make it a reality to be able to share information across the health care community.”

Information technology can significantly enhance the quality of health care for individuals and for the overall health care community.

“This initiative will help make the promise of health care information technology a reality across the nation,” Corley says

The team’s charge is to develop and provide a process for establishing standards so health care information can be shared electronically between the people and organizations involved in the patient’s care.

“It’s crucial to be able to share information so the clinician treating you can get full view of the care you’re receiving and your health status,” Corley said.

How crucial that sharing can be is evident in the examples of success and failure during Hurricane Katrina.

“Some people who fled the scene (in the Gulf Coast) had no record of their health care, including prescriptions or diagnoses,” Corley said. “They had to almost start over with a health care record. Then there were others whose providers had already taken the leap in providing electronic information and were able to preserve their records.”

The January meeting was called primarily to finalize organizational work needed to make it a national panel, such as defining and approving the charter and bylaws. Several technology committees were formally launched as well, Corley says.

The next step is to establish a regular meeting schedule and to support the committees in their work on key focus areas.

Throughout the process, maintaining patient privacy will be critical.

“There is a clear recognition of the need to keep information private and secure. We have to make that a fundamental part of the process,” Corley says.