Tech panel meeting behind closed doors

The Obama administration is holding yet another closed-door meeting to discuss national health information technology policy. This time, it's a day-long meeting today of a branch of the President's Council of Advisers 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, today's session “is 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.

The meeting, held at the National Academies of Science offices in Washington, includes several PCAST members, according to John Halamka, who also was invited to participate. Halamka is a physician and 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 Health Information Technology Standards Panel.

Also attending is privacy expert Deven McGraw, director of the Health Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. McGraw is a member of the Health Information Technology Policy Committee.

Like PCAST, both the HIT Standards and Policy committees are organized under the FACA and both have had workgroup meetings recently in closed-door sessions.

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