A Brief Debrief

When creating the Public Policy Debrief, the CHIME public policy team starts by keeping their eyes and ears open. “We survey the policy landscape throughout the week and seek to identify topics that would be of interest to the CHIME community that fall within our policy priorities,” Leslie Krigstein, vice president of congressional affairs, explained.

As Washington D.C.’s news cycle trundles forward and important updates and questions from lawmakers around healthcare IT come down the pipe from various government organizations, the CHIME public policy team is busy listening, responding and bouncing ideas off members.

Krigstein added, “Led by Jake Glancy [the newest public policy team member at CHIME], we draft the content and it goes through our internal approval process. We also vet topics weekly with the Policy Steering Committee to deem if they would be of interest to the CHIME community, or they’ll highlight ones we may have missed.”This member-led approach creates a valuable weekly document that helps keep members informed across all four of CHIME’s associations. Members are free to share this information across their organizations and with others in their networks to help keep everyone informed. For Nicole Kerkenbush, chief performance officer at Regional Health and AEHIA Board chair, the Monday Debrief travels far and wide.

“The Debrief is essential to our organization in a variety of ways, the first of which is that it helps keep my team and other senior IT leadership informed,” said Kerkenbush. “For AEHIA members, it helps keep us in tune with regulations, new calls to action from the federal government and renewed federal interest in things like interoperability or EHRs.”

But the Debrief travels beyond just Regional Health. “I discovered that outside of my organization, many of the state lawmakers and stakeholders we work with needed more information about policy discussions at the federal level. Since then, we’ve been passing along the CHIME Public Policy Debrief and have helped continue important discussions on healthcare IT at the state and local levels.”

It’s clear from the impact of sweeping legislation like the HITECH Act and HIPAA that the federal government can and does have a sweeping impact on healthcare IT and can be a driving force when it sees fit. “Staying in the know matters,” Kerkenbush said, “and getting an update every Monday in a digestible form is vital for my organization and the people we work with to staying informed.”

On the importance of public policy, Krigstein added, “Members appreciate the concise ‘key takeaway’ and ‘why it matters’ approach. We often hear stories like Nicole’s that our Debriefs are forwarded throughout an organization as they are a digestible take on what folks need to know about what’s going in D.C.”

Watch for the Washington Debrief in your email box every Monday.