“There is no more opportunity than in health IT,” he said. However, focus is the top challenge for health IT professionals because there is so much work to be done to support the caregiving team and also to meet the very challenging requirements of Meaningful Use.
While flawed, the former principal deputy at the ONC did illustrate significant achievements that are a result of Meaningful Use. Muntz said HITECH has:
- Stimulated the economy
- Created jobs
- Raised awareness of health IT
- Started meaningful conversations in the boardroom, in the provider’s space and in public
Muntz said Meaningful Use should end at Stage 3. It is a wise idea, he said, to choose constrained healthcare standards as a starting point and expand from there. The required use of Consolidated CDA and Direct Project in Stage 2 both seem to meet that criteria.
The next frontier for healthcare and health IT, he said, is to change patient behavior. Population health management is not enough. Real change will only happen with direct patient engagement, something that is often overshadowed by all the hype surrounding big data, a term he believes should be removed from the health IT discussion. Personalized data is much more relevant to patient care.
This more personalized approach for using health data was reflected in his comments on workflow: “’Lifeflow’ instead of workflow. Patients don’t work there, they live there.”
He ended the keynote by offering up his list of health IT hopes for the future:
- Expand telemedicine
- See the equivalent of NTSB for Health IT
- Establish a usability yardstick
- Support for a community security credential
- Fund RECs long term
- Complete work of FDASIA
- More ONC certification for behavioral health and long-term acute care
- The ONC needs to focus on coordinating federal activities of health IT and less on policy
- Create a national patient ID
All great points from someone with years of experience from both the provider level and at the highest levels of the ONC.
