When Healthy People 2000 was dreamed up two decades ago, the World Wide Web was not much more than a figment of someone’s imagination. When Healthy People 2010 was issued 10 years later, the Web had become a powerful avenue for democratizing access to health information. How can we possibly anticipate what the Internet will mean when we try to evaluate the nation’s health in 2020?

That’s the start of my post on the blog that is serving as an important input for the development of the Healthy People 2020 objectives for e-health and health communication. In addition to this post, I’ll be monitoring the input to HHS on this topic for the next two weeks, so come join the conversation over there.

The US Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) is hard at work developing new objectives for Healthy People 2020. This fourth version of objectives (the 1990 objectives were first published in 1979) is being designed like its predecessors to motivate action and improvements in the public’s health.

Healthy People has been holding stakeholder meetings across the country and held one this morning at the National Institutes of Health, where I had hoped to offer oral public comment. Not surprisingly, many others had the same plan and being number 48 on the list rendered it unlikely that I would get a chance to speak, so I have submitted a brief written statement instead. Here it is:

Healthy People 2020’s objectives should recognize that facilitating patient-centered communication through health information technology (HIT) is absolutely essential to health improvement.

Research has clearly demonstrated that effective care management, particularly for people with chronic conditions, requires engaging them effectively as active partners through proactive delivery of targeted information and other health communication strategies. Most notably, the body of research on the Chronic Care Model (CCM) led by Ed Wagner and the subsequent efforts that have built on the CCM framework have made clear how important the integration of HIT and patient-centered health communication is to improving the health of Americans.

Effective empowerment and engagement of lay people in their health care requires that we develop HIT tools focused on the needs of consumers. Specifically, we need to ensure that personal electronic health tools link individuals’ own health data to accurate, comprehensive content that puts that data into context in an understandable and meaningful way.

The evolution of personal HIT tools is evolving so quickly that we probably cannot even envision what the standard tools of 2020 will look like. If we look back 10 years to 1998, how many people could have foreseen how powerful applications such as online social networks and interactive multimedia health education have become?

What we can do is set objectives for the country that guide HIT developers to ensure that new applications meet consumers’ needs for information that is tailored to their particular needs. That is essential to overcome health disparities and improve health and health care for all Americans.

More to come in the near future on the IxCenter engagement around Healthy People 2020, including discussion of it at the 7th Annual Ix Conference by HHS’s Office of the National Coordinator for HIT and Office of Disease Prevention & Health Promotion. In the interim, if you’re interested in offering your insights, go to the Healthy People 2020 Web site and submit your own public comments.