Addressing a recent summit in San Francisco on the California Regional Health Information Organization, National Coordinator for Health IT David Brailer said that CalRHIO’s work on outlining guidance documents for providers, vendors and other data-sharing projects “creates more de facto precedence that can be given attention” during national efforts to harmonize and certify standards for a national health information network.
“It creates its own success, it takes away the intellectual debate that could go on forever about how this should be and moves us to the practical debate about how do we move forward,” Brailer said.
The special audio report also includes comments from Ann Donovan, CalRHIO’s project director, about RHIOs as a public utility and Dr. Andrew Wiesenthal, associate executive director for the Kaiser Permanente Foundation, about CalRHIO’s promotion of personal health records (Rebillot, California Healthline, 3/6).
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