Even though 2010 is still several months away, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services has been hard at work for more than a year and a half in developing objectives for Healthy People 2020 (in fact, I wrote about some of my involvement with this effort as far back as October 2007, and in more detail in May and July of last year, here, here and here). In particular, there are significant efforts to improve e-health and health communication (including information therapy (Ix) and patient-centered health information technology (HIT) focus) by HHS’s Office of Disease Prevention & Health Promotion (ODPHP), Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for HIT, and the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC).

HHS has developed some Web 2.0 approaches to revising existing Healthy People objectives and developing new ones. You can now join the discussion by going to a Web site that has dozens of threads going on e-health and health communication objectives.

For example, in this thread, I’ve advocated for the need to drive toward much better clinical decision support for consumers:

“I would argue that consumer decision support is a greater priority due to both its critical role in chronic care management, disease prevention & health promotion (see a recent Archives of Internal Medicine study described here for example of research demonstrating greater importance of engaging consumers than clinicians) and because it’s been a lower priority historically.  I could suggest some ways of operationalizing it if anyone’s interested.“

With regard to a thread on one of the existing objectives (11.4) from Healthy People 2010, “Increase the proportion of health-related Web sites that disclose information that can be used to assess the quality of the site,” I based my comment on my own research on health information quality (see “Mysterious Maze of the World Wide Web: What Makes Health Information High Quality?” white paper):

“Create a more meaningful and more robust approach to measurement of information quality to include (in addition to structural assessment of information quality): measurement of accuracy & comprehensiveness of health content; and user assessments of the utility and functionality of the content.” 

I will be offering additional input through this discussion board this week related to the ONC federal HIT strategic plan, CDC priorities, and other issues that affect how HIT is used to promote better health, and I encourage everyone else to do the same. Whatever you think is important in terms of national priorities for e-health & health communication, this is a great opportunity to make your voice heard.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 10:40 am and is filed under Decision Support, Information Quality, Inside the Beltway. 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.