The Office of the National Coordinator for HIT released the long-awaited Federal HIT Strategic Plan yesterday. It has two goals: Patient-focused health care; and population health. Furthermore, the plan explicitly states that the 43 strategies proposed are characterized by three things including, “Focus on the consumer of health care as a critical participant in achieving the two overarching goals of the Strategic Plan.

Chuck Friedman, the Deputy National Coordinator who played an instrumental role in writing the strategic plan, will be discussing its implications for Ix implementation–with a particular emphasis on health disparities–at our 7th Annual Ix Conference next week in the session, “Ix Initiatives to Overcome Health Disparities: Strategic Planning and Implementation in the Public & Private Sectors.”

A few strategies (copied below) are particularly noteworthy. If implemented, they could go a long way to advancing information therapy (Ix), improving health care delivery, and saving our health care system.

• Strategy 1.2.6: Encourage health care organizations to provide personal health information in usable standardized electronic form to consumers or their designees.
  • Consumers are being encouraged to take a more active role in managing their own health care. Interoperable health IT can catalyze patient-focused care by increasing consumers’ (or their designees’) ability to electronically access, accumulate, and manage their personal health information. Greater access to usable, electronic health information in standard formats can yield improvements in health literacy, patient-provider communication, care coordination, and overall quality of care. Strategy 1.2.6 seeks to encourage health care organizations to offer health information to consumers or their designees in standardized electronic form.
• Strategy 1.2.8: Through the identification and recognition of standards, empower individuals to use their health data to serve their needs beyond direct patient care delivery.
  • Medical records play a significant role in many areas of an individual’s life beyond direct patient care. Records are needed for everything from preventing illness, to establishing immunizations for school attendance, to determining the impact of a disabling condition in order to obtain services and benefits. Immediately critical in this arena is the need to enable persons with disabilities to authorize the electronic movement of their medical records to key public and private service providers. This strategy seeks to promote the development and recognition of standards necessary to support this type of interoperability, and to encourage providers to take advantage of the benefits it brings.
• Strategy 1.3.6: Identify key PHR functions and features that will allow individuals to link their health information to a wide variety of market-driven personal health tools that they and their designees find valuable in managing their heath and care.
  • PHRs have low rates of adoption to date for many reasons. While secure websites that enable patients to access their electronic health records are widely used where available, there is considerable confusion about what constitutes a free-standing PHR that is wholly controlled by the patient or consumer. This strategy seeks to define the key elements of a free standing PHR that will support secure maintenance of an individual’s personal health information so that it can link to the myriad of applications being developed in the marketplace to support that individual’s ability to manage his or her own health.
• Strategy 1.3.7: Design methods to promote the use of PHRs and other consumer health IT tools by consumers and their designees.
  • Communicating with consumers about the benefits of PHRs and self management of one’s own health may require new approaches to be effective. This strategy will expand and increase our understanding of how best to use these new technologies to the benefit of individuals interested in better management of their own health and care.
• Strategy 1.3.9: Remove technical, financial, workflow, and other barriers to diagnosing, treating, and communicating with patients outside the boundaries of traditional health care settings.
  • Our provider focused health care system is predicated on patients accessing care in the clinical setting. However, actual care is primarily dependent on decisions made in the home, office, or school setting by the patient – often without the guidance of their clinicians. Adoption and use has been very slow of new technologies that can provide data and enable communication between individuals and their clinicians at the time when it is needed. This strategy will promote adoption by helping the industry to understand the sources of the barriers to adoption and by identifying solutions that promote more widespread use of these technologies.
• Strategy 1.4.2: Empower consumers through representation in multi-stakeholder governance entities at the national, state, and local level.
  • For care delivery to truly be patient-focused, consumers’ interests must be reflected in policies and governance for the exchange of health information nationwide. Consumer participation in national, state, and local governance entities is necessary to enable health IT initiatives that reflect consumer priorities, ensure public trust, and maximize consumer welfare. Strategy 1.4.2 emphasizes the importance of consumer involvement in developing organizational policies and procedures around the exchange of health information, identifying effective methods for engaging consumers, and working to promote consumer involvement in activities nationwide.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Engaging Consumers, Inside the Beltway. Tags: HHS , Office of the National Coordinator You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.