Governor Christine Gregoire has established the Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration (HISPC) for Washington State and has designated Qualis Health, a private nonprofit Quality Improvement Organization, to lead this project. The Washington State Health Care Authority is the lead agency for the state government.
At its core this important one-year project is designed to help facilitate electronic health care information exchange while assuring that such information remains private and secure. The information collected and solutions proposed from this work in Washington State will be integrated with results from parallel work in a number of other states and will be instrumental in developing an interoperable nationwide health information network.
Team Description
As the word 'collaboration' in the project title implies, HISPC will be successful only with substantive input from a wide range of stakeholders - public/private payers, consumers, physicians, hospitals, long-term care facilities, and others. To meet HISPC objectives, Washington State Working Groups will be formed containing experts in the areas of privacy and security policies, business practices for health information exchange, and legal requirements in Washington Staterelated to these policies. The following briefly describes proposed Working Groups accountabilities.
- State Variations Working Group (SVWG) - tasked with assessing variations in organizational-level business policies and practices, categorizing them as barriers, best practices, or neutral with respect to interoperability. Will work closely with the SLWG in producing the 'interim assessment of variation' report due August 25, 2006.
- State Legal Working Group (SLWG) - tasked with assessing privacy and security policies underlying regulations, court cases, etc. and identifying legal sources of barriers to interoperable EHRs. The SLWG will also develop a set of recommended policies that are consistent with Washington State laws. Will work closely with SVWG in producing the 'interim assessment of variation report' due August 25, 2006 ? and will also work with the SSWG and SIPWG to help ensure that laws are accurately and consistently interpreted throughout the process of formulating solutions and implementation planning.
- State Solutions Working Group (SSWG) - tasked to review the assessment of variation of state laws and business policies identified as barriers by the SVWG and formulating preliminary solutions to address barriers. 'Interim analysis of solutions report' due October 16, 2006.
- State Implementation Plan Working Group (SIPWG) - responsible for reviewing the interim analysis of solutions report created by the SSWG and proposing preliminary implementation plans in the 'interim implementation plan report' due November 16, 2006.
- Ad Hoc Working Groups (AWG) - these are subgroups of specific stakeholder groups tasked to conduct work needed to support the SVWG, SSWG, SLWG, and SIPWG.
How to get involved
How can you sign up?
You may wish to volunteer for a Working Group, or volunteer to provide substantive review of Working Group draft report materials, or simply receive periodic progress report updates on Washington State's HISPC efforts.
Thank you!
Milestones
Links to relevant web pages
