In the journal Health Affairs, Carol Diamond, managing director of the Markle Foundation health program, and Clay Shirky, a professor of telecommunications at New York University, write that the current focus of national health IT planners on technology solutions rather than setting health care goals for those solutions has stymied progress on health IT.
“The challenge of thinking of health IT as a tool to improve quality requires serious attention to transforming the U.S. health care system as a whole, rather than simply computerizing the current setup,” the wrote.
“Without adequate investment in the much harder challenges--such as how to motivate IT adoption toward achieving better health and health care, which financial policies will support this goal, or what information policies are necessary to protect information and engender patient trust--we will surely miss the mark.”
The piece drew responses from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and others.
“We fully agree … that deployment of health information technology (IT) is necessary but not sufficient for transforming U.S. health care,” wrote Robert Kolodner, national coordinator for health information technology; Simon Cohn, associate executive director of the Permanente Federation, and deputy national coordinator Charles Friedman. “However, the recent work to advance health IT is far from an exercise in ‘magical thinking.’”
Instead, national planners have focused strategically in the areas of adoption, governance, privacy and security, they said. “A broad national consensus is emerging in support of advancing health IT to enable the transformation of health and care.”
In a separate response, David Kibbe, a senior adviser to the American Academy of Family Physicians, and Curtis McLaughlin, a business professor at the University of North Carolina, noted that health IT planning has overly relied on established industry experts.
“We need a health IT planning process that is more dynamic in its technological forecasting and inclusive of IT experts from outside the industry," they said.
Government Health IT presents Liesa Jo Jenkins, executive director of CareSpark, in this recent eSeminar, where she shared her experiences and insight into building a health information exchange that enhances community health, rewards regional collaboration and drives economic progress.
