Rather than merely addressing broad health system goals, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) should refine its strategic plan for 2015 to spell out clearly the unique federal roles and activities that can be used to assess progress toward the desired outcomes, encourages the American Hospital Association (AHA) in a February 6, 2015, comment letter to ONC. With limited federal resources available to make progress in the area of health information technology (IT), AHA believes that some of ONC's goals should be prioritized over others. For example, AHA states that the objectives to "enable individuals, providers and public health entities to securely send, receive, find and use electronic health information" and to "identify, prioritize and advance technical standards to support secure and interoperable health information" are a prerequisite to fulfilling other goals and should, therefore, be addressed first. Furthermore, AHA believes that progress in this area also relies on solving the problem of correctly matching patients to their records, as well as other methods to accurately authenticate information across data sources; thus, the hospital association urges ONC to build on the work it started in 2014 to make progress on patient matching. Because the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act tasks ONC with developing a strategic plan that includes "specific objectives, milestones, and metrics," AHA encourages ONC to provide more details on how goals will be met, including specific activities by individual agencies, expected timelines for completion of those activities, and an assessment of whether existing federal resources are sufficient to complete all of the goals outlined. The hospital association feels that this level of detail would benefit private sector partners seeking to align their goals and understand how the federal government will act in the future. In addition, AHA recommends that ONC establish a website or other publically accessible forum to provide transparency on agency progress in executing the plan.

HRC Recommends: Risk managers may also encourage their organizations to prioritize their organization's health IT goals in light of ONC's strategic plan and AHA's response. Risk managers may consider how best to help their organizations use health IT to achieve its goals while managing risks that may arise, such as those related to implementation, incentives and penalties, health information privacy and security, and clinical use.