Mostashari shares visions of health IT's future

Farzad Mostashari, MD, national coordinator for Health IT, clued the nation into five health IT trends expected to take off as healthcare reform progresses and predicted that 2012 is the year that health IT “truly comes of age.”

In a Jan. 25 HealthIT Buzz post, Mostashari outlined the rising trends:

Meaningful Use: With more than 20,000 eligible professionals and 1,200 hospitals already receiving payments from the Medicare or Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs, Mostashari noted other good adoption signs such as a survey indicating attainment of meaningful use is a top priority for more than two-thirds of hospital executives and a fivefold increase in e-prescribing by office-based physicians since 2000. “My prediction is that at least 100,000 providers will receive Medicare or Medicaid EHR incentive payments by the end of 2012,” wrote Mostashari. “But, in order for my prediction to come true, the entire health IT ecosystem, including technology vendors, physician and hospital leaders, regional extension centers, state-level health IT coordinators, public health agencies and many others need to pull together toward getting as many providers to meaningful use as possible.”

Health Information Exchange (HIE): Mostashari stated that the foundation built with Stage 1 meaningful use, backed with increased HIE requirements in Stage 2, will help HIE soar in 2012. The Direct Project provides a standardized way to send encrypted health information, enabling providers to meet Stage 1 meaningful use exchange requirements, he wrote. “Standards development is now focusing on the Nationwide Health Information Network…As the business value for exchange increases, our standards efforts will bear fruit, reducing the cost and complexity of implementing basic exchange functions like sending a care summary or receiving lab results. With increased value and lowered cost, information will start to flow. But, it will only move at the speed of trust.”

Health IT and Payment Reform: New payment models, such as accountable care organizations, patient-centered medical homes, bundled payments and quality measurement/improvement initiatives may seem disconnected from each other, but they all have a common denominator: Success depends on better information about each patient’s health needs than paper records can provide, he noted. “As more providers adopt EHRs and go through the process of attesting to meaningful use, I believe they will increasingly see the direct connections between health IT, new payment models, and the ways in which the former can help them succeed with the latter,” Mostashari wrote.

e-Health: He also predicted that consumers and patients will use IT to become better informed about their health and more engaged with their own care. This will be due to ease of electronic access to health information via personal health records like Blue Button and patient portals directly connected to EHRs.

Innovation: “Innovation is the lifeblood of technology, whether we are talking about health IT or otherwise,” wrote Mostashari. “Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are being directly integrated into health IT systems, and I expect this trend will continue to pick up speed as capabilities such as voice recognition are perfected. The growing emphasis on value-based payment models will help fuel innovation around products and services that help providers perform quality measurement/improvement and population health management. There will be increasing emphasis on data analytics and finding ways of using data to support population health management, as well as feed information back into EHRs in ways that support a learning health system.”