HLC President: Data Infrastructure Change Will Have Profound Health Impact
Speaking to a national audience focused on health information technology, the president of the Healthcare Leadership Council said today there is strong momentum in support of a national interoperable health data network, and that policymakers need to ensure that clinicians, researchers and others involved in healthcare are able to share information that “can have the greatest impact on patients and on medicine’s future.
HLC President Mary R. Grealy spoke October 21 at the WEDI-Con conference in Reston, VA. WEDI, the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange, is a public-private coalition focused on improving health data exchange to improve healthcare quality and reduce costs.
In her speech, Ms. Grealy said fulfilling the promise of healthcare information-sharing requires a two-pronged approach: Creating the interoperable technological infrastructure that will enable system-wide data exchange and expanding accessibility to information that will accelerate medical research, improve clinical effectiveness and enable greater care coordination.
She said the impetus to create an interoperable data-sharing network is being aided by bipartisan congressional support, the leadership of the federal Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology and a public that “expects healthcare to have the same connectivity that they have in every other aspect of their lives.”
On the issue of data accessibility, Ms. Grealy said, “Within the Medicare program alone, we have an almost unimaginable wealth of data collected from the trillions of healthcare information exchanges involving the care of more than 40 million beneficiaries. And in the private sector, we have vast expertise in data analysis and the capability to translate this mountain of raw healthcare information into meaningful knowledge about how to improve care. But, Washington rules being what they are, we can’t always bring the two together.”
She said important conversations are taking place between private sector healthcare entities, including HLC, and federal officials on how to broaden access to federal health data.
