On January 20th, the HIT Standards Committee held its January meeting in Washington, DC. Jonathan Perlin, the Chair of the HIT Standards Committee, initiated the meeting with a quote from Dr. David Blumenthal’s recent New England Journal of Medicine article, “Information is the lifeblood of modern medicine. Health information technology is destined to be its circulatory system.” This quote set the tone for the rest of the day, in which committee members examined how standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria — as seen in the recently released Interim Final Rule (IFR) and meaningful use Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) – can transform healthcare.
