The federal government's chief technology officer says that new standards for health information technology systems need to be kept simple. The comments from Aneesh Chopra came before an advisory committee that will make recommendations to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The department is slated to unveil preliminary proposals before the end of the year.

Chopra said that HHS should not let "the perfect be the enemy of the good enough," in its effort to meet the goal. Nextgov.com reported that Chopra suggested that HHS must design easy-to-understand standards for the "little guy" clinician.

HHS is in the process of developing standards that will govern the exchange between clinicians and hospitals of complex health care information about a single patient. Depending on the mobility of that patient, these records could be located in one place or scattered across the country.

Chopra said benchmarks already developed for the web should guide the exchange of health information, and he suggested creating a "health Internet" based on that work.

Vinton Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google, wrote in a blog that "getting the standards right can have [a] major positive benefit. Getting them wrong will have major downside consequences."

For more on health IT:
- see this Nextgov.com article

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