Earlier this year we celebrated the 20th birthday of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Technology Policy/Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (hereafter ASTP) and reflected on the transformative impact of health IT on patient care delivery in the US. These developments have been instrumental in creating a more connected and patient-focused health care system, supporting our goal of seamless data exchange between health care providers, and enabling real-time access to critical patient health information.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced in July that it was reorganizing its internal operations to place more of an emphasis on data and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence.  As part of the restructuring, HHS’s Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology was renamed the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Micky Tripathi, who has been serving as the department’s acting chief artificial intelligence officer, was named as the head of the new joint office. HHS is currently in the process of looking to hire a permanent CAIO, chief technology officer and chief data officer, all of which will be overseen by Tripathi in his new role. 

ASTP launched the Strengthening the Technical Advancement and Readiness of Public Health via Health Information Exchange (STAR HIE Program) in 2020. In 2021, it was expanded to increase support for efforts to improve vaccination data sharing between state and local immunization information systems (IIS) and HIEs. KONZA in Topeka, Kansas was among the 22 recipients that received a combined $5 million in funds from ASTP via the CARES Act.

Oracle Health will apply to become a Qualified Health Information Network under the federal government’s health data exchange framework, the technology giant said Monday. TEFCA, or the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, uses QHINs — which can represent dozens or hundreds of health systems, public health agencies, payers and health IT vendors — to support health information sharing, according to the HHS’ Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy/Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. To get official designation, QHINs have to complete technology and security testing and agree to the data sharing rules before being onboarded. TEFCA went live in December with five QHINs, and two more organizations were approved early this year. 

Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (ASTP) and National Coordinator for Health IT Micky Tripathi, who also serves as acting chief AI officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, sees a wide range of use cases for AI. “It’s just a way of compressing that administrative time,” said Tripathi at the event. “In medical settings, for example, and I saw a survey that something like 60 to 70% of doctors are using a lot of foundation models to check for drug interactions. You realize [AI is] not used in just HR.”