Jon White MD Deputy National Coordinator in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT http://healthit.gov speaking at MedCity ENGAGE http://medcitynews.com announced that ONC’s Health IT Policy Committee’s Precision Medicine Task Force is now operational and met for the first time.
The Precision Medicine Task Force was established as a short-term group, to support the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI www.whitehouse.gov/precision-medicine. ONC is a key participant in the PMI, with responsibilities to advance data standards to support precision medicine, address relevant privacy policies, and advance innovation in health IT.
The task force has the responsibility to identify data standards and to implement specifications to make health IT data available to participants and researchers working in the field of precision medicine.
Five people were invited to the White House to discuss their innovative projects and the relationship of the projects to precision medicine. Genetic Alliance President and CEO, Sharon Terry discussed the Alliance’s “Platform for Engaging Everyone Responsibly Registry” (PEER) www.geneticalliance.org/programs/biotrust/peer. The registry differs from traditional registry systems in that it lets participants control how much information they wish to share, who can share it, and for what purpose.
She announced that the registry has added the capability to directly upload data from their EHRs into PEER. The group is now in the process of deploying this capability in both existing and slated PEER Community releases over the coming weeks.
Cerner Corp www.cerner.com and the National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE) http://nate-trust.org assisted in adding PEER’s new clinical data acceptance capabilities. PEER can now accept coded, clinical, and direct-compliant data.