The Obama administration held yet another closed-door meeting to discuss national health information technology policy.
This time, it was a daylong meeting of a branch of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, or PCAST.
PCAST is organized under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA, which generally calls for its meetings to be held in public. But, according to Rick Weiss, director of strategic communications and senior science and technology policy analyst for the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, last week's session was “a working group meeting that is not open to the public."
“Working groups with FACA committees are not required to follow the same rules as FACA,” Weiss said.
Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, is a co-chairman of PCAST. Christine Cassel, president and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine and former dean of the School of Medicine and vice president for medical affairs at Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, is a member.
The meeting was being held at the National Academies of Science offices in Washington.
Attendees include several members of PCAST, according to John Halamka, who also was invited to participate.
Halamka is a physician who is chief information officer at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center who serves as chairman of the federally funded Health Information Technology Standards Panel and is vice chairman of the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel.
Also attending was privacy expert Deven McGraw, director of the Health Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. McGraw is a member of the Health IT Policy Committee.
Like PCAST, both the HIT Standards and Policy committees are organized under the FACA and both have had
work group meetings recently in closed-door sessions.
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