About half of HHS — including ONC — will close down at noon Monday if the Senate fails to pass a temporary budget bill, which is scheduled for vote at that time, according to Politico Morning eHealth newsletter.
In a government shutdown, nonessential employees are furloughed and told not to come to work, while others considered essential will report to their offices, although they won't be paid right away.
Although the House passed a month-long funding resolution Jan. 18, Senate Democrats opposed the stopgap bill in favor of protecting immigration legislation.
Here are seven things to know about how the government shutdown will affect health IT.
1. The federal plan for the shutdown notes ONC "will be unable to increase interoperability and coordinate federal efforts to ensure improvements of usability." The agency will temporarily stop working on standards coordination, implementation and testing required by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act and the 21st Century Cures Act. It will also halt its work with partners on information blocking and other policy activities. Just six of the ONC's 179 employees will report to work during the shutdown.
2. HHS has charged about 536 staff members with maintaining the agency's computer system, a majority of them a devoted to the National Institutes of Health.
"The majority of retained individuals would be for the maintenance of the hospital data network, clinical research information system, picture archiving and communications systems, radiology information system, and other components directly related to the electronic patient medical record [e.g., patient care unit workstations on wheels and bar coding devices]," the HHS plan states. "Additional retained employees would be necessary to curate concurrent toxicologic data from external contractor sites requiring sophisticated data-handling expertise to prevent corruption of data streams, as well as to ensure the integrity of experimental data systems."
3. The FDA's digital health sectors will also be closed.
4. More than half of the employees at the Department of Homeland Security's National Protection and Programs Directorate — the branch responsible cyber and infrastructure protection — are expected to be exempt from furlough, according to The Hill.
5. Other agencies are expected to see their IT and cybersecurity departments shrink under the shutdown.
"Cyberattacks will continue with or without a budget, however the risks at non-security agencies are even higher as they are not necessarily prepared to deal with security risk in the cyber world with staffs that may not necessarily be considered essential," James Norton, a former Homeland Security official, told The Hill.
6. Though lawmakers are likely to pass another short-term resolution to maintain funds, experts and industry representatives warn these stopgap bills limit what the federal government can invest in IT or roll out on new programs.
7. HHS staffers were told to show up for work Monday, with the furloughs beginning around the time the Senate votes on its emergency funding bill. However, it takes about four hours to shut down a government office, an HHS staffer told Politico.
More articles on health IT:
Amazon adds top Iora Health physician to healthcare team
Novant, Wake Forest Baptist agree to share MyChart information