ONC creates roadmap for Health IT Safety Center

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and RTI International teamed up to create a roadmap for improving the identification and sharing of information on health IT-related safety events and hazards. Dubbed Health IT Safety Center, the roadmap lays out how it plans to do just that.

The roadmap focuses on two objectives: using health IT to make care safer and continuously improving the safety of health IT. The roadmap workgroup gathered input from health IT safety experts, patient advocates, clinician users, health IT developers and healthcare organizations. The Center does not have a regulatory function.

"The roadmap envisions the federal government providing seed funding of between $17.8 million and $20.6 million for the first five years of operations, after which the organization would work on developing sustainable funding models," reports sister publication Healthcare Informatics. 

"Health IT has already demonstrated that it can make care safer, although achieving its true potential for transforming health care requires all stakeholders to do much better," the roadmap states. "The safety of health IT can be improved, and the improvement should be continuous, as part of a learning health system."

Read more about the roadmap here. 

Click here to see the roadmap.

Megan Combs

Megan Combs was Associate Editor of I Advance Senior Care / Long Term Living from 2013-2018.