Advisers Balk At National Health Information Network Proposal

Despite eagerness to have formal recommendations in place, the government's full health IT (HIT) policy committee this week balked at a proposal for the National Health Information Network's (NHIN) governance structure, and instead asked workgroup chair John Lumpkin, MD, to flesh out some thorny details before it could formally vote on the issue.

Those thorny details revolved around a portion of the program which called for the creation of a non-government organization (NGO) that would disseminate best practices and resolve problems faster than a formal government body could. "There is a bit of a concern that once you put those into a FACA (group formed under the Federal Advisory Committee Act), it becomes frozen. We need to have something that plays that role which has the flexibility only an NGO could have," said Lumpkin, SVP and director of the healthcare group at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.