Dr. Halamka does a pretty good job on spelling out the “wish” list here, as he serves on the committees and has “first hand” knowledge. I would like to go one step further here and hope that the new secretary of HHS knows what all of this is about, in other words, knows what SNOMED is and represents and how crucial this is to healthcare, understands what CCHIT certification means and accomplishes as any stimulus money allocated has to meet the software standards, and has full awareness of what “standards” are in healthcare, since about 70% of the HHS Secretary position will involve making many decisions based on knowledge of the entire process and how it all flows together. 95% of our decision making processes today rely on some type of code or software and healthcare is no different by any means. 
The healthcare system and the science it involves today can’t function without the accelerated “hands on” expertise, in other words it takes more than just a spokesperson relying on all information relayed from others, otherwise we end up with “magpie” healthcare, standards and procedures, without perhaps the full benefits of full transparency, what we are looking for today.
Science and healthcare are merging and that is a fact and something others may or may not be aware of, and leadership for HHS requires a little bit of Science and Biotech knowledge too, look at all the causes, such as Stand Up For Cancer, the Howard Hughes Center, and so many more with philanthropy trying to bring better medical care to all of us, this is Science and this is Healthcare together.
So my wishes here are to have someone in a position that has some “hands on” experience and knowledge in many of the areas that now encompass leading the HHS department and not just the same old risk management policies that have prevailed the last 8 years and have somewhat stymied the progress of finding cures for disease and better serving the needs of the citizens of the US. Once more I’ll ask that the administration go shopping in the “smart” store and not the “political” store so we can all enjoy progress and putting our healthcare system back on track. Harry Markopolos recently taught us a lot about “smart” people and what they can accomplish, given the opportunity and the benefit that others will listen and learn to appreciate technology, and hopefully stop ignoring and criticizing technology and algorithms they are not familiar with. BD
“After many discussions with the leadership of NeHC, CCHIT and HITSP, my hope is that NeHC becomes the Standards Committee referred to in the bill and that the great folks already chosen to serve on NeHC continue their service. The NeHC as configured is multi-disciplinary and not dominated by any one group. The new Standards Committee should continue to provide Value Case, as described in the NeHC charter, to prioritize standards harmonization, architecture and best practices needed to ensure interoperability.
NeHC will become the standards committee and will create value cases that contain standards and architecture for HITSP to harmonize and CCHIT to certify……implementing the content standards (such as CCD with RxNorm and SNOMED-CT vocabularies), the transport standards (HTTPS with SOAP or REST), and the routing (query/response or publish subscribe framework such as XDS or XDR).”
Life as a Healthcare CIO: My Hopes and Expectations for the Next Year
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