Source: Healthcare Innovation
When the initial Qualified Health Information Networks were announced on Feb. 13, several federal health leaders, including CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, M.D., M.P.H., highlighted the potential public health use cases for TEFCA. At the CDC-ONC Industry Day on Feb. 27, Micky Tripathi, Ph.D., national coordinator for health IT, elaborated on TEFCA as well as other efforts underway to modernize the public health data infrastructure. Tripathi began by saying that a focus of HHS has been building cross-agency muscle, and doing everything it can to make sure that the department is more than the sum of its parts. “We at ONC are doing everything we can to be a service partner to all of our HHS partners, and there’s no greater example of that than the work that we’re doing with CDC,” he said. “We’re trying to pull every single lever we have to be able to support the public health mission and help Dr. Walensky and the CDC team’s vision of getting us to the next evolution of public health infrastructure.”