Beyond 2012 election: Mostashari, health IT orgs share thoughts

One week after the 2012 election and the healthcare community is coming to grips with what may or may not change going forward. Just getting past the election allows everyone to focus on the task at hand, from increasing the adoption of health IT to better engagement with the patient.

For example, “Obama’s re-election brings stability at a critical time for health IT,” says College of Health Information Management Executives’ (CHIME) Senior Director of Advocacy Sharon Canner. “CHIME looks forward to helping support the continued advances and progress made in the last few years to accelerate health IT—particularly the platforms created under Meaningful Use for Stages 1 and 2, the certification process for EHRs, the standards and interoperability framework [S&I] and the parallel work done by the states on creating health information exchanges. The very capable leadership from the Office of the National Coordinator [ONC] and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services [CMS] will continue with important efforts directed at both educating and listening to the hospitals and other providers so critical to deploying the tools of HIT to transform the delivery of better care for patients.”

William Bria, MD, president of the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS), also sees Obama’s re-election as a time to keep the ball rolling on numerous fronts, particularly regarding patient involvement. “The shift of the locus of power in healthcare from the granite towers of academic medical centers and large healthcare systems to the community is not a reality yet” but is coming, he says. Meaningful Use is changing healthcare so that it’s no longer a question of whether an organization has a patient portal but organizations must be able to measure the actual use of the patient portal. “That’s a very significant shift in focus.”

Information needs to flow in a way that democratizes the discussion about health, Bria says. Patients, family members and other physicians all need to be involved in healthcare. “This is a brave new world,” he said. An alliance between primary care providers and the community is needed to try to address the biggest gaps in American healthcare, such as cardiovascular disease, obesity and asthma. “The only way that’s going to happen is through a lot more democratization, including patients taking a much greater role.”

Meanwhile, Farzard Mostashari, MD, ScM, the national coordinator of health IT, spoke about the state of healthcare at the Nov. 7 meeting of the HIT Policy Committee. Watching the election coverage, he said he felt “admiration and appreciation for the role that the power of data played in the campaign.” He also expressed his “appreciation for how, if that power of analysis and data has transformed marketing, campaigning, baseball, how is it possible for us to imagine a world where that power of data is not brought to bear on life and death, on clinical care, on population health?”

He said he also appreciated “truth in data.” Regardless of political persuasion, Mostashari said he felt “relief that data matters. Predictions can be based on evidence.”

Obama’s re-election “gives us in the administration more time to finish the job,” he said. “We’ve made incredible progress in the past four years on health IT and, in my view, it gives us a chance to continue to make strides, to continue the essential thrust of the policies and approaches.” However, the election reaffirmed “our responsibility to do the people’s work, to come together, Republicans and Democrats, to do the people’s work.”

The HIT Policy Committee was formed for stakeholders to come together for common goals, Mostashari said, and “focus on challenges that we can only solve together.”

Although progress has occurred in fits and starts, he said, “the painstaking work of bundling consensus--there’s no substitute for that in health IT and standards or in the broader policies. That is what we are committed to.”