In this meeting, the Council finalizes its work on its paper to outline various IT functionalities supporting accountable care organizations.

The group will discuss challenges and strategies for connecting rural healthcare providers to health information exchange.

The January 2014 edition of the Policy Workgroup webinar focuses on the ONC's Patient Matching Initiative. Beth Just, CEO of Just Associates Inc., and Craig York, Program Director at Argo Data, presented on an industry perspective of ONC's patient matching findings and common challenges and solutions to patient matching.

In March of 2014, the Connecting Communities Workgroup featured speakers discussing challenges and strategies for connecting behavioral health providers and exchanging behavioral health information. Speakers included:

Healthcare spending in the United States is disproportionately unbalanced. Patients who have higher healthcare needs account for approximately half of all healthcare spending in America. These patients, known as “Super Utilizers” suffer from multiple, complex chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and mental illness to name a few. Under the Affordable Care Act we are beginning to reform and reshape the way we traditionally think of how healthcare is delivered - through a coordinated approach, Super Utilizers can be treated in a way that will improve their health outcomes, while reducing their overall costs to the healthcare system.

The ability to collect and meaningful exchange health data is meaningfulness unless it is appropriately accessed and analyzed in order to form the best clinical decisions possible about an individual’s health and health treatment. Information from disease registries and other data repositories create opportunities for us to develop a more refined healthcare consumer matching process, analyze and predict trends, and even make predictive assumptions about an individual. As the world of health IT matures, so do the possibilities available to us to make meaningful improvements to health outcomes, more informed decision making, and to generate cost savings.