HIT Policy and Standards Committees Commence Work on National Health Information Infrastructure HITSP

HIT Policy and Standards Committees Commence Work on National Health Information Infrastructure HITSP (Health Information Technology Standards) updated to the National eHealth Collaborative in early June 2009. Here are a few highlights:

HITSP has moved rapidly to focus on meaningful use and ARRA‘s 8 priorities:
1. Encourage technology that protects the privacy of health information
2. Nationwide health information technology infrastructure
3. Utilization of a certified electronic record for each person in the US by 2014
4. Technologies that support accounting of disclosures made by a covered entity
5. Electronic records to improve quality
6. Technologies that enable identifiable health information to be rendered unusable/unreadable
7. Demographic data collection : race, ethnicity, primary language, and gender
8. Technologies that address the needs of children and other vulnerable populations

HITSP has embraced a service-oriented architecture, which enables reuse of capabilities instead of requiring new value cases for each novel requirement. Initial services include:
• Issue Ambulatory Prescriptions
• Query for Medication History
• Communication of Structured Documents
• Communication of Unstructured Documents
• Clinical Referral Request
• Retrieval of Medical Knowledge
• Return Laboratory Results Message
• Communication of Laboratory Reports
• Communication of Imaging Information
• Quality Measures for Hospital based Quality Information Collection and Reporting
• Quality Measures for Clinician Quality Information Collection and Reporting
• Immunization Registry Update
• Immunization Registry Query
• Communication of Immunization Documents
• Vaccine and Drug Inventory Reporting
• Public Health Case Reporting
• Emergency Common Alerting
• Send and Receive Relevant BioSurveillance Data
• Communicate Resource Utilization
• Exchange Administrative Benefits/Eligibility Transactions
• Exchange Administrative Referral/Authorization Transactions
• Provider Directory

HITSP is moving to an electronic publication approach for all its implementation guidance.

HITSP has embraced USHIK as a repository for its harmonized standards and code sets

The July 15 deliverables will directly support the needs of the HIT Standards Committee and its workgroups to identify standards, implementation guidance, and certification criteria in support of meaningful use.

Michael F. Arrigo

Michael Arrigo, an expert witness, and healthcare executive, brings four decades of experience in the software, financial services, and healthcare industries. In 2000, Mr. Arrigo founded No World Borders, a healthcare data, regulations, and economics firm with clients in the pharmaceutical, medical device, hospital, surgical center, physician group, diagnostic imaging, genetic testing, health I.T., and health insurance markets. His expertise spans the federal health programs Medicare and Medicaid and private insurance. He advises Medicare Advantage Organizations that provide health insurance under Part C of the Medicare Act. Mr. Arrigo serves as an expert witness regarding medical coding and billing, fraud damages, and electronic health record software for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has valued well over $1 billion in medical billings in personal injury liens, malpractice, and insurance fraud cases. The U.S. Court of Appeals considered Mr. Arrigo's opinion regarding loss amounts, vacating, and remanding sentencing in a fraud case. Mr. Arrigo provides expertise in the Medicare Secondary Payer Act, Medicare LCDs, anti-trust litigation, medical intellectual property and trade secrets, HIPAA privacy, health care electronic claim data Standards, physician compensation, Anti-Kickback Statute, Stark law, the Affordable Care Act, False Claims Act, and the ARRA HITECH Act. Arrigo advises investors on merger and acquisition (M&A) diligence in the healthcare industry on transactions cumulatively valued at over $1 billion. Mr. Arrigo spent over ten years in Silicon Valley software firms in roles from Product Manager to CEO. He was product manager for a leading-edge database technology joint venture that became commercialized as Microsoft SQL Server, Vice President of Marketing for a software company when it grew from under $2 million in revenue to a $50 million acquisition by a company now merged into Cincom Systems, hired by private equity investors to serve as Vice President of Marketing for a secure email software company until its acquisition and multi $million investor exit by a company now merged into Axway Software S.A. (Euronext: AXW.PA), and CEO of one of the first cloud-based billing software companies, licensing its technology to Citrix Systems (NASDAQ: CTXS). Later, before entering the healthcare industry, he joined Fortune 500 company Fidelity National Financial (NYSE: FNF) as a Vice President, overseeing eCommerce solutions for the mortgage banking industry. While serving as a Vice President at Fortune 500 company First American Financial (NYSE: FAF), he oversaw eCommerce and regulatory compliance technology initiatives for the top ten mortgage banks and led the Sarbanes Oxley Act Section 302 internal controls I.T. audit for the company, supporting Section 404 of the Sarbanes Oxley Act. Mr. Arrigo earned his Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Southern California. Before that, he studied computer science, statistics, and economics at the University of California, Irvine. His post-graduate studies include biomedical ethics at Harvard Medical School, biomedical informatics at Stanford Medical School, blockchain and crypto-economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and training as a Certified Professional Medical Auditor (CPMA). Mr. Arrigo is qualified to serve as a director due to his experience in healthcare data, regulations, and economics, his leadership roles in software and financial services public companies, and his healthcare M&A diligence and public company regulatory experience. Mr. Arrigo is quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine, Kaiser Health News, Consumer Affairs, National Public Radio (NPR), NBC News Houston, USA Today / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Medical Economics, Capitol ForumThe Daily Beast, the Lund Report, Inside Higher Ed, New England Psychologist, and other press and media outlets. He authored a peer-reviewed article regarding clinical documentation quality to support accurate medical coding, billing, and good patient care, published by Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) and published in Healthcare I.T. News. Mr. Arrigo serves as a member of the board of directors of a publicly traded company in the healthcare and data analytics industry, where his duties include: member, audit committee; chair, compensation committee; member, special committee.

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