Mostashari edits HIT issue of AJMC

A special issue of The American Journal of Managed Care focuses on health IT and was guest edited by Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, former national coordinator of health IT.

“This issue of AJMC provides many reasons to be hopeful that the combination of changing incentives and new data tools can indeed deliver better care at lower cost,” Mostashari wrote in his opening essay, “The Data Revolution Comes to Healthcare.”
 
The issue includes the following articles available only online:

• An account of the rapid acceptance of a health information exchange in a large public healthcare system, by David C. Kaelber, MD, PhD, MPH; Rehan Waheed, MD; Doug Einstadter, MD, MPH; Thomas E. Love, PhD; and Randall D. Cebul, MD.
• How the tension between pushing the envelope and following the rules will affect what HITECH-certified ambulatory health record products are available, by Marsha Gold, ScD; Mynti Hossain, MPP; Dustin R. Charles, MPH; and Michael F. Furukawa, PhD.
• Gold also contributes, “Employing Health Information Technology in the Real World to Transform Delivery,” which discusses how bringing HIT into practice will take time and support.
• A review of two strategies, based on practice size, for improving physician productivity with HIT, by Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD; and Robert S. Huckman, PhD.

 
Gold's study found that simultaneously changing both the infrastructure of a health system to support expansive health IT efforts and the methods by which IT tools are deployed is a process that will take time and mature unevenly in different settings. Gold, a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research in Washington, D.C., interviewed several federal and health system leaders on behalf of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT as part of a larger assessment of the HITECH Act.

Health IT needs to be considered more than just EHRs to be useful, Gold wrote. To that end, she said practices need to build up infrastructures that are "sufficiently robust."