Don’t look to the halls of Congress for the real action on healthcare IT this month.

By the time you read this column, lawmakers in Washington either will have done the historic – passed a healthcare IT bill in the House of Representatives. Or they will have come close to letting the clock run down on H.R. 4157, the healthcare IT bill from Reps. Nancy Johnson (R-Conn.) and Nathan Deal (R-Ga.).

Last month was a general snooze-fest for healthcare IT prospects on Capitol Hill. The House committees that have jurisdiction over the bill (Energy & Commerce and Ways & Means) spent much of the month wrangling over some key differences in the legislation.

To review, those included differences in exemptions to laws that could ease technology sharing in healthcare, different approaches to a move from ICD-9 to ICD-10 medical coding systems and different approaches to privacy. At press time, the committees were still attempting to hammer out those differences.

The Senate passed a healthcare IT bill (S. 1418) last year. But with legislative workdays dwindling and November elections drawing near, the chance of passing a healthcare IT bill that will reach the White House appears slim. Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.

The real space to watch this month is off the Hill, in the various standards committees and organizations attempting to speed the pace of IT adoption.

The American Health Information Community (AHIC), a 17-member federal advisory group on healthcare IT, gave a healthcare IT standards body a pile of summer homework. The Health Information Technology Standards Panel is hard at work making recommendations on standards for several “use cases” within healthcare.

AHIC and HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt gave HITSP until the end of September to come up with the recommendations. The goal, within one year, is to allow clinicians to electronically access laboratory results; provide access to patient registration summaries; and let public health agencies get data on ambulatory care and emergency department visits, utilization and lab data within a day.

In addition, a group tapped to certify electronic health records and other healthcare technology – the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology – has announced the first vendors to gain certification for ambulatory electronic health records. In the coming months, watch for the flurry of press releases and marketing maneuvers as vendors claim certification. What remains to be seen is the impact certification will have on physicians’ purchasing decisions.

Over at HHS, a new healthcare IT czar could be named this month to replace former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology David J. Brailer, MD. Stay tuned.