Federal Advisory Committee Blog (FACA Blog)

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) has launched a new blog called the Federal Advisory Committee Blog (FACA Blog).

The initial post by Judy Sparrow discusses that the FACA Blog will be uses in a spirit of transparency and collaboration to help open a broader dialogue on the issues before the Health IT Standards Committee and the Health IT Policy Committee. The post also provides some background on the role that Federal Advisory Groups play under the Federal Advisory Committee Act.

The second post by Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer, spells out the planned process for an open conversation that will take place over the next couple of weeks with various committee members blogging about a variety of topics (Proposed Standards, Interoperability, Vocabularies, Privacy, Security, Quality, Implementation Cases Studies).

The FACA Blog allows individuals to share public comments on each post and has an RSS feed. Great to see ONCHIT using a blog platform to quickly and efficiently distribute information about the ongoing work being done by the committees to further the health information technology efforts under HITECH.