Mostashari: Beacon nation will propel care
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The May 17 event, "Health IT in an Era of Accountable Care: Update from the Beacon Communities," presented by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the Brookings Institution, reflected “some of what we’ve learned from our Beacon Communities, but also the larger ‘Beacon nation’ out there,” Motashari said.
One of the principles shared by the Beacon Communities is the importance of governance, he said. "As we found with our communities, governance is everything," he said. “If we don’t truly engage stakeholders, we can’t succeed.” That group includes hospitals and physicians. It also includes public health departments, Medicaid, Federally Qualified Health Centers, consumer groups and payors, among others, he added.
“These are sources that you should be connecting to. You need that connection and you should be engaged,” he said.
Another shared principle was keeping an eye on the prize, “having [a] specific focus that you can work backward from: Pick something, measure it and improve it,” he said. “From a year ago until now, some of these Beacon Communities have moved from planning and design to getting their feet on the ground—in a very grounded, real way.”
However, that won’t guarantee success. With the exhilaration of doing real work comes real failures. “Not everything we do is going to work—we know that. What’s important is that we learn from those failures, talk about them, fail forward. We need to hear about the programs and initiatives that didn't work: It can’t be that Plan B is to make Plan A work. We've got to be able to learn and pivot.”
Fostering innovation and engaging the market are important, but so is making sure their work is truly open to all patients, including rural areas, inner cities and other underserved communities, he said.
“ONC should be talking about health IT in a way that people can understand what it means for them. … In the Beacon nation, we have the best partners we could possibly hope for,” Mostashari concluded.