Contractors push for better information sharing in health care, law enforcement

The incoming administration should expand the use of technology to share information on law enforcement and medical records, an organization of federal IT contractors urged the Obama transition team on Friday.

A series of white papers from the Industry Advisory Council recommended that President-elect Obama push for the adoption of electronic health records and expand technology standards used by law enforcement to share information.

One report, titled "The Time for Electronic Health Records is NOW!," called electronic health records a linchpin to health care reform and recommended the Obama administration make funding and adopting them a priority, arguing that they not only improve the quality of care by making all patient information readily accessible, but also reduce costs significantly and make it easier to determine the most effective treatment.

To encourage adoption of e-health records, the IAC recommended tax incentives for physicians to help them pay for health IT investments as well as grant programs aimed at state and local medical providers, particularly nonprofits and those in medically underserved areas.

A second IAC white paperproposed expanding information sharing among law enforcement agencies, arguing that many crimes could be prevented if certain data were more accessible.

"The landscape is littered with cases where court orders are not communicated to law enforcement, prosecutors fail to discover past criminal records, or police have no basis for solving crimes because they cannot exchange information on prior cases. Information sharing is at the core to improving our system of justice and defending our homeland," the report said.

The report attributed the lack of information sharing to the absence of standard terms and definitions for data. It touted the National Information Exchange Model as a breakthrough in regard to uniform standards, and called on Obama to establish it as a prototype for data sharing governmentwide and support its adoption by all agencies involved in public safety, justice and homeland protection.

NIEM is a technology standard developed through a 2005 partnership between the Justice and Homeland Security departments that uses eXtensible Markup Language, or XML, tags to define common elements in a data source, such as a name, address or past criminal conviction. Instead of establishing individual connections between the numerous legacy law enforcement systems, the NIEM standard allows any user to receive data and understand its contents.