Don’t Miss Your Chance to Weigh In
By Joy Rios, Managing Partner at Practice Transformation
Twitter: @askjoyrios
Welcome to National Health IT week, where pundits from across the country will be doing their best to raise awareness of the power of health IT to transform how care is delivered, how health information is shared, how quality is measured, how reimbursements are dispersed, and how patients engage in their own health and healthcare.
It’s a perfect time to revisit the Federal Health IT strategy and goals, especially since the current Federal Strategic roadmap only takes us to the year 2015.
Time flies when we’re having fun — the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is already a decade old! And it’s time to update the roadmap.
In a conversation about the future of Health IT in early September, Â Karen DeSalvo, National Coordinator for Health IT, stated:
“In this 10 year mark, it’s not about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), it’s about where we started and what we’ve done. So as we look ahead, it’s really about thinking and creating the policy, regulatory, and technical infrastructure that can support not just tomorrow but really build a place where the consumers and providers feel the real value of that knowledge that happens in this country is some places but not everywhere.”
She continued, “We have aspirational models, providers, market places, innovators, and entrepreneurs, but it’s not reaching everyone in the way we want. We have to weave that patchwork together in a way that is a realized game and we feel value every day.”
It’s true. Although there has been dramatic progress over the past decade in building the foundation of a health IT  infrastructure across the country, there is still much work to do.
That’s where the 2020 Roadmap comes in.Â
Stakeholders in the health IT community see the field as a critical enabler to getting our country to a place of better health at a better cost. We know that health IT goes beyond EHRs, beyond Meaningful Use, and beyond interoperability.
The first iteration of the roadmap was released in Washington, D.C. on September 4, with input from more than 200 organizations.
The approach they are taking to develop the roadmap includes:
- Identifying Key Challenges to Solve
- Gathering Feedback from the Field
- Proposing Solutions
- Revising Recommendations
If you are interested in getting involved in this public-private collaborative, consider taking the eHealth Initiative survey, which is open until October 15, or get further involved by becoming a supporter.
The final roadmap is scheduled to be released winter of 2014/2015.