Colleagues,
As reported in Government Health IT...A new report from Booz Allen Hamilton, “Toward Health Information Liquidity: Realization of Better, More Efficient Care From the Free Flow of Health Information,” calls for shifting the focus of the national health information technology strategy away from electronic health records and toward the sharing of information.
The report concludes that efforts of the last seven years, “did not result in the broad adoption of health IT” and interoperability.
“We believe public payers can lead this charge” by offering providers incentives to share information, and to focus on communications and functions rather than on products.
It also calls for accelerating the movement toward a patient-centered health care system by such means as granting patients access to their own health records and creating a voluntary national health identification system.
An expert panel helped the firm develop the report. Two of the panel members — Dr. Don Detmer, president of the American Medical Informatics Association, and Dr. Mark Frisse, a professor of biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University — took part in the press conference.
Read on at:
http://govhealthit.com/articles/2009/01/12/health-it-strategy-shoul...
Kahn said health IT funding is likely to be included in the forthcoming economic stimulus legislation. He said Congress should not try to spell out exactly how that money will be spent or how thorny issues such as medical privacy should be resolved.