American Health Information Community
Confidentiality, Privacy & Security Workgroup
August 21, 2008
Disclaimer
The views expressed in written conference materials or publications and by speakers and moderators at HHS-sponsored conferences do not necessarily reflect the official policies of HHS; nor does mention of trade names, commercial practices, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.
>> Judy Sparrow:
Good afternoon. And welcome, everybody, to the 20th meeting of the Confidentiality Privacy and Security Workgroup. Again, just a reminder, this is a federal advisory committee, which means it is being broadcast over the Internet and there will be an opportunity at the close of the meeting for the public to make comments.
Workgroup members on the telephone, please remember to mute your telephone line when you're not speaking and please identify yourselves as you begin to speak.
On the phone today we have Jill Callahan Dennis from the American Health Information Management Association. Tom Wilder from America's Health Insurance Plans. Vicky Brennan and Shaun Johnson from the DoD. And have I missed anybody on the line?
Okay. And here in the room we have.
>> Steve Posnack:
Steve Posnack, ONC.
>> David McDaniel:
David McDaniel, Veterans Health Administration.
>> Deven McGraw:
Deven McGraw, Center for Democracy and Technology.
>> Kirk Nahra:
Kirk Nahra, Wiley Rein.
>> Susan McAndrew:
Susan McAndrew, OCR.
>> Jodi Daniel:
Jody Daniel, ONC.
>> Judy Sparrow:
With that, I'll turn it over to the cochairs.
>> Deven McGraw:
Great. Kirk's looking at me. I'm looking at him. All right. Thanks everyone. And welcome to what we're hoping could be the last meeting of the workgroup. We have another one on the schedule for September11th. But depending on the amount of comments we get on the call today, both from members of the workgroup and from the public, we're really hoping that after many months of working on this letter that we will be to the point where we can declare it ready to submit, again depending on the comments that we get today.
So you also received in the packet of materials that Steve sent the minutes from our meeting on Thursday June26th. Does anybody have any additions or corrections to those at this time?
>> Steve Posnack:
Ancient history.
>> Deven McGraw:
That's right. If your memory goes back that far, more kudos to you. Just let Steve know by Monday and then we'll consider it closed and approved.
So we'll dive right into the latest and hopefully close to final, if not final, version of the letter. There were, since the last time folks saw it, a few changes. But none significantly substantive. Just some rewriting of some of the prose where we tried to make it a bit more clear. In one section, I think it was the one involving research, right, Steve, because there had been some substantial edits to the text that preceded those recommendations, some of the recommendations no longer matched. So the recommendation was streamlined so that it more appropriately matches the text that precedes it. But otherwise I don't recall that there were any substantive changes. But I open it up now to comments from any of the workgroup members.
>> Kirk Nahra:
Is there anyone on the phone that has comments about any of the letter?
(No response.)
All right, any comments from anyone in the room on anything with the letter?
>> Susan McAndrew:
Strictly formatting.
>> Deven McGraw:
Okay.
>> Susan McAndrew:
Strictly formatting issue. It is not clear why, because the way the headings are presented, you have Recommendation 1 and then 1.2 and 1.3.
>> Kirk Nahra:
We'll turn them into Recommendation 1, Recommendation 2.
>> Susan McAndrew:
Right. It's not clear why.
>> Deven McGraw:
I think the reason is because in Recommendation 1, it talks about HHS working with other stakeholders to create a set of guidelines and there's guidelines. And so what 1.1 does is say when you're doing those guidelines you should also consider X and the same thing with 1.2. Because they sort of flow from that sort of initial recommendation about coming up with guidelines.
So I don't know that it matters what their numbers are, but that's the reason why they are.
>> Kirk Nahra:
Let me suggest this as a way of explaining that, which is we should put a 1 somewhere in a heading so that we can tell what the section 1 is.
>> Steve Posnack:
That would be pretty easy. I think it's just following the formatting. The second level headings, which are the policy it starts with policies regarding network access, which is the italicized on page 2. That is the subheading for all of recommendation 1.X. so I can put
>> Kirk Nahra:
You don't have to do it automatically. Just put 1. It would be easier. I think that would match it, at least give an explanation of how they track.
>> Steve Posnack:
Okay.
>> Kirk Nahra:
All right. Anything else from folks in the room on this letter? Should we go ahead and open it up to the public at this point, if there's enough to do that?
We'll go ahead and open the phone lines in case there are comments from any of the members of the public about the letter.
>> Judy Sparrow:
Alison, can you open up the public lines.
>> Alison Gary:
Sure, no problem. For those on line you'll see a slide that tells you how to call in to comment on the letter. If you're already on the phone, just press star 1 on your phone now to comment.
>> Kirk Nahra:
All right. So we'll give people a minute to get lined up if they have any comments. Assuming there's no major substantive comments that we end up trying to do something with, what we will do is do sort of a final proof thing and make sure there's no typos and that kind of stuff.
And then the idea would be to have that as the finished letter. And then we will communicate with the workgroup in terms of next steps, if any, following that. The letter, if we do finish it in the next today or the next few weeks, that will be presented to AHIC on September23rd or for their September23rd meeting. We'll have to go in before that. Deven and Joe [Inaudible] are going to present the recommendations. I'm going to be out of town for that.
So all right with that, operator, do we have any folks from the public?
>> Alison Gary:
No, we do not.
>> Deven McGraw:
Okay. Does anybody have anything else to say?
>> :
I just want to say it's been such a pleasure.
>> Kirk Nahra:
I suspect we will certainly have our workgroup gettogether again at least for a call. It won't be substantive, necessarily. But so we'll get that letter finished. Again, proofing it non-substantive changes. If there is anything substantive, which I really don't expect that there will be, we will certainly run that by workgroup members. But with that, is there any reason not to finish up?
>> :
No.
>> Deven McGraw:
Anybody on the phone?
(No response.)
>> :
We have the meeting on the 11th.
>> Kirk Nahra:
I don't see any reason to have a public meeting on September11th. Or we'll just be wrapping up our group.
>> Deven McGraw:
If workgroup members we wouldn't need obviously all the time on the schedule. So keep it's September11th, right, at 1:00. So just keepa hold an hour's worth of time for any wrapup business that we might have to attend to, take care of. But we won't need a public meeting on that day given that we don't have any public comments to deal with.
>> Kirk Nahra:
All right. Well, everybody, short and sweet. Thank you very much. By far the shortest meeting.
>> Deven McGraw:
By far the shortest meeting. They've been getting progressively shorter.
>> Kirk Nahra:
I should have taken the bet earlier. All right. Everybody. Thank you very much.
>> Deven McGraw:
I think that’s true. It’s been several months in the making.
>> Susan McAndrew:
I think it would be appropriate to thank all the workgroup members for all their work. This has been quite an effort over quite a period of time. And I think the product is in really good shape.
>> Deven McGraw:
I think it's a good road map for future work.
>> Susan McAndrew:
You bet. That you guys will have to do.
>> Susan McAndrew:
Thank you.
>> Kirk Nahra:
All right. Everybody. Thank you very much.
>> :
Thank you.