Phase 5 (Current)

The current phase of Connecting for Health includes:

• A Focus on Personal Health

  Throughout its history Connecting for Health has placed an emphasis on achieving a private and secure electronic environment that enables the sharing of information between individual consumers, their many providers, and their many sources of health information and services. Two working groups are currently tackling different aspects of this personal health goal, as called for in the latest Common Framework paper published at the end of 2006:

  • Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Authentication Policies for Networked Personal Health Information: This working group will develop recommendations for confirming the identity of individual consumers on a health information network.
  • Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Access Policies for Networked Personal Health Information: This working group will recommend other critical policies such as privacy, consent, secondary uses, breach, notification, etc.

• A Focus on Population Health

  Since 2001, Connecting for Health has concentrated on articulating an architecture and policy framework for the secure sharing of health care information for clinical care purposes among authorized entities – typically health care organizations and professionals. We recognize that this clinical information infrastructure has equally important social value in supporting the nation’s goals of managing and improving health for the entire population. These population health objectives are realized in at least three distinct domains:

  • Bolstering research capabilities and enabling clinical practice to fully participate in and make use of scientific evidence.
  • Increasing the effectiveness of our public health system.
  • Empowering consumers and professionals with information about cost, quality, and outcomes.

• Each of these requires authorized users to access information housed in many fragmented data sources. Accelerating the availability of digital health data creates new opportunities for protecting the public from pandemics and bio-terror and improving our processes for approval and reimbursement of drugs, devices, and research initiatives that can further the clinical evidence base.
• At the same time, these opportunities may turn into liabilities if the policy and privacy implications are not addressed upfront. The potential to accelerate the use of HIT through population health applications depends upon finding legitimate and effective policy solutions to these concerns.
• We have begun to look at both the strategic and implementation issues for achieving population health objectives. We are taking stock of the current landscape of population health, especially as it concerns technical, economic, public policy, and privacy aspects of the creation and examination of composite data. These deliberations, the views of our Steering Group members, and the Connecting for Health Common Framework have advanced our work to date.
  • Our future scenarios (PDF, 44K) were created with the goal of clearly establishing a common vision for the role of population health information in a high-performing health care system of the future.
  • In addition, the Steering Group has developed the Connecting for Health First Principles for Network Design to Support Population-Level Data Analysis and Decision-Making (PDF, 50K).