U.S. IT Official Lays Out How He'll Make IT Central To Health Care

(This article was provided to me by Lou Hoyos, VP- IT and Facilities, Eastern Division)

In one of his first public speeches since being appointed last month by President Bush to increase the use of IT in health care, Dr. David Brailer said:

he will have a strategic plan by July 21 for guiding the health-care industry toward an interoperable electronic medical records system. [and]

…laid out four key elements that will shape his group’s effort to spur the effective use of IT in health care:
Support automation of health-care practice. This is the starting point, managing information where doctors, nurses, or clinicians meet patients. It also includes potentially disruptive technologies such as electronic intensive care units where doctors monitor patients at multiple ICUs with the help of IT.

Interconnecting care. Making systems interoperable offers two vital elements. One is giving doctors a choice of IT vendors, allowing them to switch vendors if they’re dissatisfied with a record system or grow beyond its capabilities, since the data can be transferred. But the bigger issue is patient choice. Patients go to many health-care providers, and need their data to move with them.

Personalization. Personalizing health-care data to individual patients is critical if patients are going to make more choices about their own care.

Population health. This includes efforts such as improving the flow of data from clinical trials to get drugs approved more quickly. But it also includes data-collection requirements that add excessive costs on the industry, such as quality and other monitoring data separate from what providers need to collect to deliver care.

full story from Information Week