Dive Brief:
- The Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT announced last week that Lana Moriarty will be its new acting director of consumer e-health. Moriarty will take the place of Lygeia Ricciardi, who left this summer after three and a half years at the position. The majority of Ricciardi’s work was focused on the department's Blue Button project, which tries to increase patient access to electronic medical records.
- Moriarty previously worked at the Health Resources and Services Administration, where she oversaw the Health Service Corps and Nurse Corps. Moriarty was brought in to keep the focus of policies on all healthcare consumers and more actively engage them in their own healthcare.
- Another new appointment at the office is director of the ONC Health IT Certification Program, Alicia Morgan. Morgan was previously a captain in the U.S. Navy, and has worked at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. She has been with the ONC since 2005.
Dive Insight:
The ONC announced Moriarty's appointment at the same time it launched the newest version of the Blue Button Toolkit. The toolkit is a public-private collaboration of government offices including the White House, the Department of Defense and the National Coordinator for Health IT. The purpose of the toolkit is to help providers increase consumer access to digital health information through technical standards and marketing materials. The new kit will work with a wider range of partners going forward. Moriarty said the goal is to get 500 companies using Blue Button.
"We have a lot of ideas that are brewing for this next year," Moriarty said. "We’ve talked about a focus on underserved communities and I think that given my connection with the National Health Service Corps, I would really like to see somehow us using the providers across this vast network to harness those types of opportunities as well."