HHS releases national data strategy to achieve better health outcomes
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has released its data strategy to improve human health outcomes. The goal is to make data available, accessible, timely, equitable, meaningfully useful and protected so that it can be used effectively by HHS, its partners and the public to improve public health, according to Thursday's announcement.
WHY IT MATTERS
The data strategy also aims to promote greater access to data to advance cancer research under the Biden Cancer Moonshot, an initiative that aims to halve the cancer death rate over the next 25 years.
“This data strategy is a critical step forward in our commitment to use data as a strategic asset to drive innovation and improve outcomes in health and human services,” HHS Assistant Secretary Andrea Palm said in a statement declaration.
HHS outlines five priorities – cultivating data talent, promoting data sharing, integrating data into program operations, enabling whole-person care by connecting human services data, and responsibly deploying artificial intelligence – to improve data infrastructure and capabilities department-wide.
The new HHS data strategy also includes expanding the role of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to include coordinating human services interoperability, in addition to its current role in enabling interoperability in the U.S. health care system.
According to HHS, several short-term initiatives have been initiated under these priorities.
One of these is CancerX Data Sprint, an ongoing collaboration that brought together more than 150 CancerX member organizations from industry and government partners to support the creation of domain-specific data element lists as extensions to the existing oncology extension of Core Data for Interoperability in the United States .
“Better integration of health and human services is critical to strengthening whole-person care, advancing health equity, and improving the customer experience,” added Micky Tripathi, the national coordinator for health information technology, in the declaration.
“ONC has been focused on increasing patient-centric interoperability in healthcare for years, and we are eager to support the HHS Data Strategy's vision for human services interoperability.”
To achieve Cancer Moonshot and other public health goals, using artificial intelligence to process the vast amount of protected data in healthcare is essential.
“The Administration is pulling out all the stops to advance the responsible use of AI in healthcare, but we cannot achieve the bold vision the President has set forth for the company with U.S. action alone,” said Danielle Carnival, deputy assistant to the president for the fight against cancer. Moonshot and deputy director for health outcomes, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said Thursday at the ONC's annual meeting.
“Leading healthcare payers and providers have announced voluntary commitments to the safe, secure and reliable procurement of AI and healthcare,” she said.
THE BIG TREND
HHS and ONC are working together and with others to shape a digital healthcare system of the future that prioritizes data sharing and explainable AI, and private organizations are joining them.
Because cancer is the second leading cause of death in the US and cancer survivors are 2.5 times more likely to go bankrupt than the rest of the population, private sector organizations like Oracle have joined CancerX to help break these numbers. improve.
In August, Oracle said by participating it aims to help define the value of digital innovation in cancer treatment, addressing methodological and implementation gaps and developing best practices for equitable adoption of digital health technologies at scale in oncology.
“Multi-stakeholder collaboration is critical to unlocking the potential of digital innovation in the fight against cancer, and we are honored to partner with Oracle to achieve CancerX's ambitious goals,” said Smit Patel, associate program director at the Digital Medicine Society, Oracle said in its announcement.
ON THE RECORD
“Synthesizing the vast amount of data across the full spectrum of cancer research and clinical care will be our best bet to reduce cancer mortality by 50% within 25 years,” said Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, director of the National Institutes of Health. “The Data Strategy will focus HHS activities on developing and implementing clinical data standards and expanding secure access to the data with the goal of unlocking the next generation of cancer prevention and treatment.”
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
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