While the HITECH Act has achieved its core goal of promoting the adoption of electronic records systems in healthcare, more needs to be done to achieve the Triple Aim of improving quality, cutting costs and improving patient satisfaction, according to a Commonwealth Fund blog post.
The authors interviewed 47 national leaders and stakeholders about efforts to use health IT to improve healthcare delivery.
Those leaders cited a need for more competition in the vendor marketplace, development of a coherent national policy to promote health information exchange and interoperability, and alignment of policy initiatives that advocate for the use of health IT with financial and structural reforms that reward value-based delivery models.
These stakeholders repeatedly mentioned problems with interoperability, which makes data-exchange difficult and leaves many clinicians without a full view of the patient's clinical history.
They urged the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to take the lead in promoting more radical thinking about how to improve EHR systems.
"Early evidence suggests that our nation's substantial investment in HIT is beginning to bear fruit, but achieving broad health system transformation will depend on aligning efforts to use HIT with wider structural and financial reforms," the authors state.
The nation's healthcare system has made "clear progress" toward achieving its Triple Aim goals, according to a report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that looked at performance in quality reporting programs between 2006 and 2012.
While an organization's portfolio of projects should address all three aspects of the Triple Aim, not every project has to tackle all three, early adopters at Primary Care Coalition in Montgomery County, Maryland, wrote in a blog post for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
To learn more:
- read the post