Every four years HHS https://www.hhs.gov updates their Strategic Plan describing how the agency plans to address complex multifaceted evolving health and human services and issues.
One of the major goals described the “HHS Strategic Plan for 2018-2022” in section “Strategic Objective 1.2” is to advance interoperable clinical information flows.
If clinical data is interoperable, patients, providers, payers, and others will be able to efficiently send, receive, and analyze data across primary, acute, and specialty care. However, the plan points out that information needs to include behavioral healthcare and data from post-acute care settings.
In addition, there is the need to implement understandable functional health information technology tools to support provider and patient decision-making and to support workflows for healthcare providers.
HHS is working to implement team-based approaches to care with plans to:
- Collaborate with healthcare systems and community partners to facilitate the spread of evidence-based clinical practices and innovations to advance patient care
- Promote and implement models to connect primary care, acute care, behavioral healthcare, long term services, using health information effectively
- Facilitate transitions between care settings especially for dually eligible Medicare-Medicaid enrollees
- Implement a collaborative model for behavioral health integration with primary care that is team driven, population focused, measurement guided, and evidence based
HHS also mentions how the agency is working to reduce disparities in quality and safety by working to improve the use of health IT among safety-net providers and community-based organizations.
HHS is going to continue to work to collect, analyze, and apply data to improve access to safe, high quality healthcare. The agency is going to continue to support communication and coordination between public, health practitioners, and clinicians to improve the use of data.
The goal in terms of meeting patient safety goals, is to improve hospital patient safety by reducing preventable patient harms, reduce the standardized infection rate for central line associated bloodstream infections in acute care hospitals, and reduce the standardized infection rate of hospital-onset clostridium difficile infections.
Go to https://www.hhs.gov/about/strategic-plan/index.html to view the HHS Strategic Plan for FY 2018-2022.