During this week's Federal News Radio Federal Executive Forum pre-recording, Dr. Leslie Lenert, Director, National Center for Public Health Informatics (NCPHI) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), shared some of his thoughts on the future of health care information technology. His comments included the following:

• The NCPHI is focused on (1) improving the link between public health and our national clinical care systems and (2) automating public health practice.
• The biggest change in health care information technology is the establishment of two-way
  communications between public health and the health care system.
• Health situational awareness is crucial to our ability to monitor public health problems. We must target situational awareness so that it makes a difference in individual patient care.
• One key to addressing privacy and confidentiality concerns is for us to move away from "individual level" information exchange unless it benefit the specific patient. We should be focused on summary level data exchange.
• Coordination models that allow collaboration across regions are important in helping us identify and disseminate best practices through Public Health Information Network (PHIN) communities of practice.

The Federal Executive Forum panel participants were:

• Vish Sankaran- Program Director, Federal Health Architecture, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
• Linda Fischetti- RN MS, Health Informatics Architect, Future Health Systems Design and Usability, Health Information Architecture, Veterans Health Administration
• Dr. Leslie Lenert- MD, MS, FACMI , Director of the National Center for Public Health Informatics (NCPHI) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
• Jim Borland- Special Advisor for Health IT, Office of the Commissioner, Social Security Administration (SSA)
• Tom Simmons- Area Vice President for Federal Systems, Citrix Systems
• Ken Rubin- Chief Architect, EDS

The complete panel discussion will be available via a Federal News Radio webcast starting Thursday, June 25th at 2pm (http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?sid=1692826&nid=50). There is no charge for this event. To receive an email reminder two hours before the webcast starts, please register.

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