HLN Learnings  Newsletter

Federal Roundup

On April 17, 2019 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology ( ONC ) released the second draft of its  Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement  (TEFCA) for comment. The initial version was released more than a year ago in January 2018 (see  the original blog ). The new draft contains lots of changes, and Dr. Noam Arzt was asked to again join the ONC’s HITAC  Trusted Exchange Framework Task Force  as it reconvened in May 2019 to discuss this draft. See HLN's extensive analysis and formal comments on this draft document in our recent blog .

On February 11, 2019 ONC released its latest Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to Improve the Interoperability of Health Information . Referred to by some people as the “Information Blocking NPRM,” since this was the primary topic anticipated, the document actually covers a host of other topics related to interoperability driven primarily by requirements of the 21st Century Cures Act. To help the public health community understand and respond to this proposal, HLN prepared  a detailed table of Public Health Issues, Impacts, and Opportunities . See all of HLN analysis and comments submitted in our full blog .

Ready or Not: New Report on Protecting the Public's Health

The Trust for America’s Health ( TFAH ) released its 2019 edition of what it hopes will be an annual report,  Ready or Not: Protecting the Public’s Health from Diseases, Disasters and Bioterrorism  last February.   The ground-breaking report warns about key global challenges ahead, like the risk of a flu pandemic; the impact of weather pattern changes due to climate change; the dangers of antimicrobial resistance, and others, and tries to offer advice on how to prepare for them. See HLN's full blog on this groundbreaking report.

Update to ICE Open Source Immunization Forecasting Software

A new release of the Immunization Calculation Engine ( ICE ) was issued over the past few months and the latest version (v 1.17.1 ) is now available. ICE is a state-of-the-art open-source software system that provides clinical decision support (CDS) for immunizations for use in Immunization Information Systems (IIS), Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Personal Health Record (PHR) Systems. This release included improvements to handling of duplicate shots, logic updates to the  DTP ,  HPV , and  Zoster  vaccine groups, and a Pneumococcal  interval fix in the Adult Series.

HLN Conference Update

2019 California Immunization Coalition Summit: HLN participated in this year's summit on April 9, 2019 in Riverside, CA. Dr. Noam Arzt , delivered two talks during breakout sessions at the summit , one on I mmunization Information System Interoperability in the New Health Information Exchange World , and the other on A Brief History of Immunization Information Systems in the US and California .

2019 Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) Annual Meeting: HLN was once again a Bronze Sponsor of this meeting which brought together more than 1,600 attendees on June 2-6, 2019 in Raleigh, NC. Dr. Noam Arzt delivered a presentation on Cloud Computing Tutorial: Driving Solutions in Public Health , and HLN also participated in a presentation on current aspects of our Reportable Conditions Kn owledge Management System (RCKMS) which support electronic case reporting (eCR).

AIRA 2019 National Meeting: Join HLN at the upcoming American Immunization Registry Association meeting on August 13-15, 2019 in Indianapolis, IN. Visit our booth (as a Gold Sponsor) and attend one of the many presentations we will be delivering with our colleagues and on our own! This year AIRA will be celebrating its twentieth anniversary and HLN is proud to be among its founding members.