The Trump administration indefinitely canceled meetings of the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC), an advisory panel that helps the federal government establish rules and standards for the use of healthcare data and technologies.
The HITAC was established by the 21st Century Cures Act, was enacted in 2016 and began having its first public meetings in 2018.
A memo sent out to HITAC members last Wednesday on behalf of Seth Pazinski, director of the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Analysis for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), announced that all HITAC meetings, including full committee meetings and task force and work group meetings, are canceled "until further notice." Fierce Healthcare reviewed a copy of the memo.
Last year, the ONC was renamed the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy and Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ASTP/ONC).
"ASTP will follow up with direction once we have received additional guidance," the memo to HITAC members said.
It is not clear from the memo when the HITAC will resume its work or whether the advisory panel will maintain its current structure and membership. The indefinite suspension of the panel creates uncertainty about how the Trump administration will regulate healthcare technology and artificial intelligence, particularly given that President Donald Trump scrapped President Joe Biden's executive order on AI.
Stat first reported the HITAC meetings were canceled on Wednesday.
HITAC co-chairs Medell Briggs-Malonson, M.D., and Sarah DeSilvey could not reached for comment at the time of publication.
The HITAC is an ONC advisory body that recommends policies, standards, implementation specifications and certification criteria to the ASTP/ONC. It concentrates its efforts on design and use of technologies that advance health equity and support public health, interoperability, privacy and security, and patient access to information.
The HITAC is comprised of at least 25 member with at least two members as advocates for patients or consumers of health IT, three members appointed by the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), two are appointed by the majority leader of the Senate, two appointed by the minority leader of the Senate, two members are tapped by the speaker of the House of Representatives and two members are tapped by the minority leader of the House of Representatives, according to the ONC's website. Other members are appointed by the comptroller general of the U.S.
Health IT executive Deven McGraw, a member of the HITAC, told Fierce Healthcare Friday that the "indefinite suspension" of meetings of the HITAC "puts HHS in violation of the 21st Century Cures Act."
"HHS didn't create HITAC of its own volition—Congress mandated creation of HITAC, and set forth a primary and secondary list of target areas for HITAC to follow in coming up with policies and technical standards to promote and facilitate the interoperability of health information to improve individual and population health," McGraw, chief regulatory and privacy officer for consumer health tech platform Ciitizen, said.
The ONC is required to work with the HITAC in certain ways, McGraw said, for example in issuing an annual report to Congress about the progress in achieving interoperability and in acting on HITAC recommendations.
"Neither HITAC nor HHS has authority to carte blanche add additional target areas - they have to inform Congress if they are going to "temporarily" focus on something other than the target areas identified by Congress," McGraw said.
An ASTP/ONC blog post published Jan. 13 noted that seven HITAC members were appointed to serve an additional three-year term on the committee, with no mention of the HITAC meetings being canceled or disrupted.
"As technology continues to transform healthcare, the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) is leading the charge to shape the future of health IT. From advancing interoperability standards to exploring the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI), HITAC’s work is laying the foundation for a smarter, more connected healthcare system," Pazinski wrote in the blog post from three weeks ago, before Trump's inauguration.
"The HITAC provides valuable insights to the assistant secretary for technology policy that can inform ASTP’s policies and programs," Pazinski wrote.
According to McGraw, Congress designed the HITAC so it would have "experts identified by Congressional leadership on both sides of the aisle, as well as stakeholders from across the healthcare ecosystem appointed by GAO as a neutral arbiter of an individual's qualifications."
"That GAO handles most of the appointments is designed to assure there is representation of a broad range of views, knowledge and experiences," McGraw said.
"The HITAC is not, and never has been, a place to move a partisan agenda. HITAC and its predecessors have a long history of delivering sound and actionable recommendations that have helped the U.S. be a leader in digitizing and responsibly using electronic health records," she said.
Without the HITAC, it's not clear how the ONC will continue to make rapid progress on interoperability, as the HITAC is the "primary vehicle for the development of standards and policy with broad public input," McGraw also noted.
In 2024, the HITAC transmitted 172 recommendations to the ASTP, chief among them an assessment of proposed policies included in the HTI-2 proposed rule as well as recommendations for data elements and standards to finalize the U.S. Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) Version 5, according to Pazinski in the ASTP blog post from three weeks ago.
"Interoperability as a policy goal has always enjoyed broad public and bipartisan support, so this step is quite surprising and, if the suspension continues, risks significantly slowing our progress to a modern, digital health ecosystem," McGraw told Fierce Healthcare.
The HITAC's ongoing work was key to the HHS' efforts to formulate rules and guardrails around the use of AI in healthcare.
In April 2024, the HITAC held an AI hearing. In the panel's annual report to Congress and the HHS secretary, the HITAC added a new target area focused on the use of AI as part of health IT systems supporting healthcare delivery and improving the quality of patient care.
In the ASTP blog post, Pazinski said the HITAC's anticipated work in 2025 would focus on health equity practices, challenges and resources to help health and human services organizations; draft USCDI Version 6; a review of adopted standards and implementation specifications; and the HITAC annual report.
During Trump's first week in office, the HHS was ordered to pause all public communications and public appearances "that are not directly related to emergencies or critical to preserving health."
The administration also has canceled scientific meetings and gatherings across its health agencies. Within the HHS, resources from the department such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a weekly public health publication that has run without break since 1960, have been put on hold.
Friday, the CDC and other federal health agencies took down web pages with information on HIV statistics and scrubbed critical data on LGBTQIA+ issues as part of an executive order seeking to "end federal funding of gender ideology."
Last week, a vague but sweeping pause on federal funding spurred alarm among providers until it was delayed by courts and subsequently rescinded—though comments from the White House suggest the effort isn’t totally dead. Friday, a second federal judge put the Trump administration's "temporary pause" and review of federal financial assistance on ice, and this time the temporary restraining order is indefinite and much more sweeping.