Today was day 1 of the ASCO HIT/EHR Symposium, which covered a wide range of the ever changing HIT landscape.  Paul Tang, Vice Chair of the ONC HIT Policy Committee, and Chuck Friedman, former Chief Scientific Officer of ONC, now Director of Health Informatics at the U. Michigan School of Public Health and School of Information, led the day with a review of Meaningful Use and the underlying concepts of a Learning Health System.  In the 5 months since MU incentive dollars have started to flow, almost $1 billion have been qualified for and an estimated 20% of the nation's physicians and 50% of its hospitals have registered.  While most physicians are internists, 10% have been cardiologists, indicating that specialists are included.  Stage 2 criteria are expected to be put out for public comment by CMS within the next few weeks and ONC recommendations included Care Plans and Summary documents, one of ASCO's main goals for some time now.  It is anticipated that by 2019, 80% of health data will be digital. Anticipating that, next Monday, IOM is holding a workshop to discuss transformation of the  clinical trial enterprise and acceleration of drug development by 2020 through application of the Learning Health System and yesterday ASCO released its Blueprint Document on setting directions for clinical trial based research over the rest of this decade.  

To get there will require extensive build out of information exchanges capability and bi-directional information flow, most likely by a federated distributed data network model that will link knowledge bases such as EHRs, SEER, state tumor registrars, ASCO, Pharma, and Cancer Centers, among others.  The topic of data exchange was the focus of sessions on state Health Information Exchanges by the former Georgia Cancer Coalition (a project now taken over by Georgia Tech) and from Marc Overhage of the Regenstreif Institute/Seimens, and on Data sharing between molecular based labs and EHRs by Larry Shulman (DFCI, ASCO HIT WG) and David Fenstermacher of the Moffitt Cancer Center. 

Other sessions were led by ASCO HIT WG members, Marilou Terpenning, Edward Ambinder, John Krauss, and Robert Miller spoke to ACOs, Social Media and the Vendor Challenge demonstration.

A fascinating collection of HIT experts and a wonderful survey of what the future holds for the practice of oncology and improving treatments for cancer.

Wish you were all here.