The Health and Human Services Department's health IT agency convened a task force to assess whether to maintain or phase out its existing standards for health IT products.
While it's important to introduce updated standards, "we also need to look back and talk about pruning, as well," said Micky Tripathi, chief of the HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, at a meeting of the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee on Thursday.
The Adopted Standards Task Force will be part of HITAC, which advises ONC.
The task force will review standards and implementation specifications that ONC sets for health IT products certified through the agency's health IT certification program, such as those established through ONC's 2020 information-blocking and interoperability rule and 2015 health IT certification program rule.
The task force will present recommendations for HITAC to approve Sept. 14.
"This is a process where the industry gets to provide a 'check,'" said Seth Pazinski, director of the strategic planning and coordination division at ONC, at Thursday's meeting. "The HITAC recommendations that we'll get from the task force will be an input to inform future ONC rule-making."