News: Planning Continues for National Health IT Safety Center

RTI International has released the Health IT Safety Center Roadmap, which it produced for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). The report (available at www.healthitsafety.org) lays out a plan for creating a sustainable center dedicated to improving the safety of healthcare through the use of information technology (IT) while also addressing safety problems introduced by the use of IT.

The national center was proposed in 2014 in a report developed by the FDA in collaboration with ONC and the Federal Communications Commission. The earlier report described the Health IT Safety Center as “‘critical’ to reducing the need for a more regulatory approach” (p. 2).

RTI enlisted 22 individuals for the task force that developed the Roadmap, representing national medical, hospital, and pharmaceutical associations; Patient Safety Organizations; patient/consumer advocacy groups; electronic health record developers and vendors; researchers on human factors engineering, patient safety, and health IT safety; nursing informatics; hospital IT leadership; a small provider practice; medical liability insurers; a healthcare accrediting organization; and a healthcare payer.

The Safety Center would be federally funded and hosted initially by an existing private organization—not a federal agency. RTI estimates that the center will require between $17.8 and $20.6 million for the first five years. The center is expected to generate increasing amounts of additional funding from participants starting in year three.
In addition to the Roadmap, RTI is producing a series of 10 webinars about health IT and safety. Visit www.healthitsafety.org/education.html to register for upcoming webinars and to access recordings and slides for those that have already taken place.