RE: 2020-2025 Federal Health IT Strategic Plan
Dear Secretary Azar and Dr. Rucker,
On behalf of the Alliance of Specialty Medicine (the “Alliance”), representing more than 100,000
specialty physicians from 15 specialty and subspecialty societies, we are writing to provide feedback on
the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT’s 2020-2025 Federal Health IT Strategic Plan.
The Alliance is deeply committed to the development of sound federal health care policy that fosters
patient access to the highest quality specialty care. As such, we applaud ONC for its department-wide,
outcomes-focused effort to continue to advance interoperability among health care providers, payers,
and patients, and to help patients become more engaged partners in care through enhanced access to
data. We are especially supportive of ONC’s overarching goal of developing health IT policies through
open, transparent, and accountable processes, and look forward to continuing to provide you with the
specialty clinician perspective.
Below, we offer feedback on select goals and objectives outlined in the Strategic Plan:
Goal 1: Promote Health and Wellness
Objective 1c: Integrate health and human services information
The Alliance appreciates ONC’s recognition of the need to better integrate health and human services
data in order to provide more person-centered care and to improve our understanding and better
address social determinants of health. The ongoing lack of real-time coordination and integration of
data between not only various federal, state, and local agencies, but also between the government and
specialty-led clinical data registries creates major inefficiencies and inhibits our ability to truly
understand and improve upon existing gaps of care. We support this objective, but request that ONC
also consider strategies to better support data sharing with clinical data registries. The ability to easily
merge administrative and clinical data sets is critical for providing a more complete picture of healthcare
spending and utilization in relation to outcomes and for addressing ongoing gaps in the quality of care.
Read full letter here
