5 Takeaways from the Health IT Summit

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently reorganized its policy arm under the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy/National Coordinator of Health IT (ASTP). It is getting a new digital service division, said Micky Tripathi, head of ASTP.

“We will have teams that will provide digital services and technical assistance to all of our operating and staffing divisions so that they don’t have to worry about going out and hiring teams for that kind of expertise,” said Tripathi, who will oversee the new division. “They will be on demand and will help with consulting and the enablement of technologies.”

Terry Luedtke, chief architect and product engineering director of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ EHR Modernization Integration Office, said that the agency’s current pause on EHR deployments is comparable to DOD’s. Both of these pauses are designed to understand what works and what doesn’t before moving on to deployment at a much larger scale.

“DOD delivered a few sites and then took a pause to really go back and look at how they optimize what they’ve learned before going forward, and we’re doing the same thing. It’s really very common in a large health care system to pause on a rollout, to go back and look [and say]: ‘Here’s all our assumptions, which ones really fit?’ That’s the stage we’re in right now, looking at that and seeing what should be changing, what does or doesn’t work in our space,” said Luedtke.

Brian Mazanec, deputy director of HHS’ Office of Preparedness at ASPR, told GovCIO Media & Research that his office is developing a “one-stop shop” to serve as a focal point to support preparedness and education to combat cyber threats in the health sector. Mazanec emphasized that everyone will need to evolve at the pace of threats to buttress health care organizations’ resiliency.

“Being a federal agency, it’s not always the fastest to bring on staff and grow. That is a challenge that we’re navigating,” said Mazanec.

The pace of change in health innovation requires agencies to be nimble, officials noted at the event. Advancing agency mission means thinking creatively to keep pace with the speed of technology, said Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) CIO Nikolaos Ipiotis.

“We have to be agile. We are a very small agency and we have to act fast,” said Ipiotis. “The key thing is that we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. We want to leverage existing technologies to the maximum extent.”

Health care organizations are adopting artificial intelligence to process data, improve clinical care and strengthen health research. To better implement emerging technology, health agencies will need to hire, recruit and train staff to work with AI, officials said.

“There’s a pretty big mismatch between the experts in AI and machine learning, mostly coming from the computer science world and the people that we’ve historically funded,” said National Institutes of Health Assistant Director for Catalytic Data Resource Chris Kinsinger. “[They are] usually PhDs and medical doctors and with a lot of familiarity with biology and medicine.”