Public Health at Health Information Technology Standards Panel

The Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) is a cooperative public-private partnership to achieve a widely accepted set of standards to enable widespread interoperability among healthcare software applications, as they will interact in local and regional health information exchanges and in a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). HITSP serves as a national health information technology standards harmonization entity. HITSP Technical Committees (TC) develop interoperability specifications for the national use cases identified by the American Health Information Community. In this process, HITSP selects and harmonizes (identifies and resolves gaps and overlaps) health information technology (HIT) standards included in the interoperability specification.. HITSP Population Health TC has been developing interoperability specifications for the several national public health use cases, i.e., Biosurveillance; Quality; Public Health Reporting; and Immunization & Emergency Response. There is a need to assure broader involvement of public health professionals in the HITSP standard harmonization process for public health and other national use cases. Because the development of interoperability specifications is a highly technical task, there is a need to include a specialized training on HIT standardization into the public health informatics curriculum for public health professionals (users) to help their participation in the interoperability specification development process together with information technology specialists (vendors). There is also a need to communicate to a broader public health community about the public health involvement in the standard harmonization process via HITSP.