HHS, March 22, 2012 – “The National Quality Strategy sets three aims for improving health care in our country: better care, affordable care, and healthy people and communities. Information that is accurate, up to date, and available when and where a patient seeks care is the lifeblood of health care improvement and crucial to reaching these goals. The stage is set for the nation to make rapid progress on health information exchange (HIE) this year supporting achievement of the three-part aim.
This Program Information Notice (PIN) guidance provides a common set of privacy and security rules of the road to assure provider and public trust and enable rapid progress in health information exchange to support patient care. It addresses concerns from State leaders and other stakeholders that health information exchange efforts have been hampered and slowed by the lack of consistent approaches to core privacy and security issues and responds to requests for clear national guidance.”