Building a Smarter Planet. A Smarter Planet Blog.

During the week of June 29, 2009, I had the great pleasure of working with colleagues at the eHealth Initiative, MIT, and Healthcare Conference Administrators, who hosted the HIT Symposium at the Massachussets Institute of Technology in Boston, MA.

The Symposium included some of the best presentations I’d heard in a long while in the health IT arena, including presentations from HHS National Coordinator for Health IT Dr. David Blumenthal, AHRQ Director Dr. Carolyn Clancy, and Clayton Christensen.

Of great interest was the common theme that rang throughout the program….that unprecedented investments of $36B in health IT should focus on improvements in the quality, safety and efficiency of health care–and that health IT is not an end unto itself. This is very consistent with the mantra of the non-profit, independent, multi-stakeholder eHealth Initiative, when I was at its helm as its CEO from its founding to April 2009 of this year.

I had the privilege of providing an overview of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and some of my own insights regarding how health IT policy should evolve at the beginning of the conference, before Dr. Blumenthal made his keynote remarks.

Dr. Blumenthal and his colleagues at HHS have an enormous responsibility, which we understand–based on his remarks at MIT and in all of his public comments–he does not take lightly. Effectively accelerating the adoption of health IT, but doing so in a way that enables innovation and most importantly, assures that U.S. citizens will derive the benefits–which include improvements both in care delivery and population health–is no easy task. But this is clearly a task that he is up to.

His significant understanding of health policy, his openness and willingness to listen, his ability to move the status quo, and most of all, his strength of conviction for and relentless focus on health and health care improvement as the goal, will enable him to effectively navigate the complexities and the myriad of stakeholder interests, to get to thoughtful and effective strategies for improving health and health care through the use of IT. An online video presentation is available from the HIT Symposium web site.

During my remarks at the Symposium, I highlighted some of my own key insights as input to the Administration as it creates its strategy and path forward for health IT:

1. Meaningful use should focus on rewarding improvements in health and health care, and then providing the informational foundational to support those improvements. This would include the sharing of information to support care delivery decisions and population health goals including laboratory test results, medication-related information, and other key data elements.
2. With the right incentives in place, and clarity around a national set of standards (including a clear timeline for future roll-out), several innovative approaches for helping providers achieve meaningful use can and will occur.
3. Incentives are needed not only to support higher quality, more efficient care delivery, but also the use of such information (while effectively protecting patient privacy) to support improvements in population health including those related to better care coordination, performance measurement for improvement, medical product safety, public health, and understanding better what works and doesn’t work in healthcare.

Click here for a copy of my presentation.