HHS Finalizes Health IT Strategic Plan for 2024-2030
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy/Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ASTP), has announced its final 2024-2030 Federal Health IT Strategic Plan. The Health IT Strategic Plan, a requirement of the HITECH Act, outlines the federal health information technology (health IT) goals and objectives to use healthIT and electronic health information (EHI) to promote health and wellness, enhance the delivery and experience of care, accelerate research and innovation, and connect the health system with health data.
“The release of our latest health IT strategy is a culmination of partnership across the federal government to examine the forces shaping the health care ecosystem today and to craft a set of strategies to guide how to prioritize resources, align and coordinate federal health IT initiatives and activities, signal priorities to industry, and benchmark and assess progress over time,” said Micky Tripathi, Ph.D., assistant secretary for technology policy and national coordinator for health information technology.
The HHS collaborated with more than 25 federal agencies central to the advancement of health IT and considered comments from stakeholders including healthcare systems, associations and specialty societies, electronic health record developers, patient advocates, and others. The strategic plan includes the steps that are required to improve the experiences and outcomes for health IT users, which include improving individual access to EHI, healthcare delivery, experience, competition, affordability and health equity. Through improved access, exchange, and use of EHI, the HHS aims to improve public health, health research, health data quality, and whole-person care delivery by connecting human services data. The plan also includes the policy and technology components that are required to support health IT users.
“The quality and safety of the analytics and recommendations provided by AI and other data-driven technologies depends on high-quality and representative data,” said Keith E. Campbell, M.D., Ph.D., Program Director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Systematic Harmonization and Interoperability Enhancement for Laboratory Data (SHIELD) program. “The Plan represents an important commitment to improving both the access to and the quality of the health care data which are the foundation for developing safe and high-quality AI technologies.”
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Federal Health IT Strategic Plan Goals and Objectives. Source: HHS
“Now more than ever, equitable and affordable broadband connectivity is increasingly critical to ensuring that all Americans can get well and stay healthy,” said Michele Ellison, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) general counsel and chair of the agency’s Connect2Health Task Force. “The latest Federal Health IT Strategic Plan recognizes how our health system can benefit from cutting-edge communications infrastructure, particularly in rural and underserved areas—enabling us to better engage individuals, their caregivers, and physicians across the care continuum and drive high-quality care, while lowering cost.
