U.S. Health Chief Says Country on Track To Meet EHR Goal
In an interview with The Hill, HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt said that President Bush's 10-year goal to provide every U.S. resident with access to an electronic health record by 2014 "will be accomplished," noting that "once the consumer begins to see [the technology's] value, it spreads quickly."
Leavitt said, "I think it's important to remember that the goal here isn't [EHRs]. The goal is to transform the sector of health care into a system of health care, a system that provides consumers with information about the quality and cost of their care." He added, "To accomplish that, we need to have information digitized rather than on paper, and we need to have that information mobilized so that it can be assembled in many different ways that are useful."
Leavitt detailed four actions that Congress should take in the near future to advance health IT:
- Back the standards-development process and ensure that federal initiatives support those standards;
- Leverage power as a payer to encourage e-prescribing adoption;
- Use power as a payer to encourage EHR adoption; and
- Approve legislation to resolve the dispute over the use of Medicare claims data to measure quality.
Health IT "is an enabler of better quality, lower costs, fewer mistakes and more convenience," Leavitt said (Young,
The Hill, 5/7).