I do what I always do, when a major health IT strategy white paper appears: count ‘workflow’s! 🙂 In the case of Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: A 10-Year Vision to Achieve an Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure, just released by the ONC, workflow is mentioned in four passages.
4 'workflow's (IMHO gonna need workflow tech) RT ONC 10yr Vision to Achieve …
— Charles Webster MD ()
And here they are.
“One size does not fit all. Interoperability requires technical and policy conformance amongnetworks, technical systems and their components. It also requires behavior and culturechange on the part of users. We will strive for baseline interoperability across health IT infrastructure, while allowing innovators and technologists to vary the user experience (the feel and function of tools) in order to best meet the user’s needs based on the scenario athand, technology available, workflow design, personal preferences, and other factors….
We will work with stakeholders to refine standards, policies, and services to automate the continuous quality improvement process and deliver targeted clinical decision support that fits into a clinician’s workflow to close care gaps and improve the quality and efficiency of care….
We will encourage the development and use of policy and technology and workflow practices to advance patients’ rights to access, amend, and make informed choices about the disclosure of their electronic health information….
We will work to improve standards, technology, and workflow that enable the electronic collection and management of consent as well as the electronic exchange of related information within existing legal requirements (including notice of redisclosure restrictions).”
Accomplishing these aims will require workflow technology. My most relevant blog posts are:
- From Syntactic & Semantic To Pragmatic Interoperability In Healthcare
- Out Of The Health IT Tar Pit: My Comments on A Robust Health Data Infrastructure