Leavitt warns against losing health IT momentum

By John Pulley
Friday, November 14, 2008

The post-election political tide sweeping through Washington, D.C. threatens to wash out a newly-formed foundation for promoting health IT, Mike Leavitt, outgoing secretary of Health and Human Services, warned.

In their zeal to reform health care, the incoming administration and the next Congress could abandon progress made in recent years in adopting interoperable health IT standards, suggested the secretary.

“This is a very important moment, and it’s a fragile moment,” said Leavitt, speaking Nov. 13 at the inaugural board meeting of AHIC Successor, Inc. Incorporated in July, the independent public-private partnership’s stated mission is to develop a unified approach for creating an effective, interoperable nationwide health information system.

“Our country is surely to move into a robust discussion of health care, generally, where almost every politician is going to stand up and give their two minute speech about health IT, very few of whom know anything about what it means,” the secretary said.

“And what makes it very fragile is that some of those folk may logically think, ‘well, we need some standards, let’s have the government do it or let’s have somebody else do it,’ without knowing what has gone into the development of where we are today. It is frighteningly possible that they could begin to do all of this again.”

As secretary of HHS, Leavitt has been a champion of leveraging information technology to modernize the country’s health system. He took his lead from President Bush, who in 2004 set a 10-year goal of building an interoperable health IT infrastructure that would support electronic health records for all Americans.

AHIC Successor, known as AHIC 2.0 or A2, succeeds the American Health Information Community, a federal advisory body established in 2005 to make recommendations about how best to accelerate adoption of interoperable health IT in a smooth, market-led way.

Like its predecessor, A2 seeks to develop IT standards without resorting to government mandate or market determinism. The former is subject to “bureaucratic crawl,” Leavitt said, the latter to a “last vendor standing” mentality.

AHIC laid the groundwork necessary “to transition at the right moment to a group that could have the virtue of public sector involvement but private sector innovation, and speed and flexibility,” the secretary said. “That moment is today.”

But if Congress changes course and abandons the public-private model established during the past few years in favor of legislating health IT standards, Leavitt warns, the process and the public good will suffer. To forestall that scenario, Leavitt urged A2’s board members to educate lawmakers about the implications of changing course.

“A2 is probably the most important group in health care that nobody knows,” the secretary said. “What we’ve done here could be unsettled if people don’t understand it.”