HIMSS roundtable finds common ground
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| Mary Stevens, Editor Image source: TriMed Media Group |
At a HIMSS Roundtable Webinar discussion yesterday, a state senator, the director of the Massachusetts eHealth Initiative and the senior vice president and CIO of the state’s largest insurer united to make this point.
The Bay State took “a fairly bold step” in 2006 to expand access to health insurance well in advance of the current federal program, said Massachusetts state Sen. Richard Moore. “We recognized the role of health IT in the process, probably because we have a lot of health IT leaders from our state, and we were able to work with them early on as we were crafting our healthcare reform initiative,” he said.
“We see health IT maybe not as the answer to everything … but clearly, if we are to have accountable care organizations and medical home, and manage conditions, we need the resources that HIT can provide.”
The senator went on to provide my favorite quote of the week: “This one area that nobody is going to want to repeal. If you can get John Kerry and Newt Gingrich on same stage singing HIT’s praises, it’s not an ideological issue. … We believe everybody recognizes the importance of using this technology to deliver best possible care.” Here’s hoping.
The challenges of building the health IT framework are on many physicians’ and policymakers’ minds, including the ONC. Getting the Massachusetts plan up and running--and supported--has been a coordinated effort to understand and then explain what infrastructure would need to be adopted, and what would be expected of stakeholders, said Richard Shoup, PhD, director of the Massachusetts eHealth Initiative (MeHI), the state’s Regional Extension Center. Shoup’s organization kept lines of communication open, using a physician group of champions to talk up REC, a website and member-only portal to get the word out, he said.
Both Moore and Shoup said they were also very encouraged by federal efforts to strengthen the healthcare workforce, including training technicians as well as doctors and nurses to keep the system running and protect the privacy of patients. Training programs could help produce 23,000 jobs in the state alone, and technicians will be vital if the health coverage initiative in Massachusetts is to stay on track.
I think we’ve got the right team to get us there,” said Moore. “We think we’re No. 1 and we want to stay there. [But] we challenge the rest of the country to catch up.”
Any takers? Let me know at mstevens@trimedmedia.com