The eHealth Initiative released today its “Blueprint,” a document with prescriptions for speeding the adoption of health information technology throughout the health care sector.
The prescriptions are addressed to almost every type of organization involved in health care, including federal agencies, Congress, and state and local governments.
At a press conference, leaders of the eHealth Initiative, a nonprofit organization, touted the six months’ worth of effort they and volunteers from health interest groups put into “Blueprint.”
When asked to name the most remarkable thing about the document, eHealth Initiative Chief Executive Officer Janet Marchibroda said, “We were able to reach consensus across a very broad range of stakeholders” from nearly 200 organizations.
The report calls on everyone involved in health care to take action. “This is a report that does not wait on federal action or other action” before its recommendations can be implemented, said Christine Bechtel, the organization’s vice president of public policy and government relations.
Nonetheless, eHealth Initiative officials said they would like Congress to complete action on pending health IT legislation. “The pace of change through Congress has been agonizingly slow,” said Dr. John Tooker, chief executive officer of the American College of Physicians and president of the eHealth Initiative.
Bechtel said the recommendations should help Congress move forward with legislation because the document represents a consensus.
However, the eHealth Initiative leaders said “Blueprint” is incomplete in two important areas: how to pay for health IT and how to satisfy everyone's concerns about privacy and security. They said they plan to update the document often.
One of the recommendations the document makes is to call on the Health and Human Services Department, working with the Certification Commission for Healthcare IT, to require vendors to incorporate interoperability standards in health IT applications at the point of care next year or in 2009.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
