Onizuka spoke with GHIT contributing writer Brian Robinson on Washington state's health IT road map. Please click on the Play button below to listen to the Webcast.
Although Washington’s health agency only recently published a road
map for the state’s future investment in health information technology,
officials there feel it is several steps ahead of many other states because
of the IT infrastructure it already has.
“Everybody is at various stages of development and others are more
advanced than us,” said Richard Onizuka, director of health care policy
for the Washington State Health Care Authority (HCA). “But Washington
already has an extensive IT infrastructure in the private sector.”
That definitely influenced the model that the HCA finally came up with
for the road map, which it detailed in a December
2006 report,
he said.
Washington state has had a focus on health for some time, but the emphasis
on IT took a big step forward when Gov. Chris Gregoire made a statewide
goal for health IT one of the five points she listed in a 2005 strategy
for improving health care.
Experts estimated that about 30 percent of medical testing is redundant
because specialists don’t know primary care providers already performed
tests, Gregoire said at the time, and the more they shared information the
more quality is improved.
The Washington Senate directed HCA and the Health Information Infrastructure
Advisory Board to develop a strategy for the adoption and use of electronic
medical records and health IT, which resulted in the road map published
last year.
It called for the implementation of a competitive health record banking
model, which will allow people to access their records at many different
sites, and for specific plans to spur the adoption of electronic medical
records by health care providers.
That will likely also take a change also in the state’s provider
compensation processes, Onizuka said.
With the funding already agreed to for the 2007-2009 biennium, he hopes
Washington will be able to establish pilot programs to test the capabilities
of the proposed infrastructure model within the next year or two.
Government Health IT presents Rick Friedman, director of the division of state systems for the Center for Medicaid and State Operations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in this recent eSeminar regarding how the federal Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services is partnering with state Medicaid and health and human services officials to bring Medicaid into the digital age. Paul McCloskey, Government Health IT editor, moderates.
