David Blumenthal, who heads the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology (HIT), spoke at a Center for American Progress briefing this morning on, “Aligning Health IT and Health Reform: Achieving an Information-Driven Health Care System.”

Blumenthal reiterated that the HIT provisions (HITECH) of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA) were not about the narrow objective of HIT adoption, but much more so about the bigger goals of “health reform, health improvement, effiiciency improvement, getting more value…” He added, importantly, that this wasn’t just about their interactions with providers, “but also to help people stay away from the health care system and live healthier lives.”

Blumenthal commented that the ambitious HITECH timetable creates enormous time pressure on ONC, but it also “gives us a discipline; it focuses us on the most important things… What is meaningful use and how do we get to it?”

ONC’s first draft definition made important strides (though there is still room for improvement), particularly in terms of strategies for better engaging consumers and families. The HIT Policy Committee advising ONC will issue its next iteration of the meaningful use definition at its meeting tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under EHRs, Engaging Consumers, Health Care Reform, 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.