ONC Unveils 10-Year Quality Improvement Vision for Health IT
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT released a 10-year vision report for leveraging health IT to enable quality improvement in health care, Health Data Management reports.
Report Details
The 10-year quality improvement report is meant to complement ONC's 10-year roadmap for achieving an interoperable health IT infrastructure.
The report aims to align clinical decision support and clinical quality measurement in an effort to "enable robust and continuous quality improvement."
In a blog post announcing the report, Deputy National Coordinator for Health IT Jacob Reider wrote that "while [clinical decision support] and [clinical quality measurement] have the same goals ... their methods, technical tools and standards have heretofore been disconnected from each other" (Slabodkin, Health Data Management, 11/14).
Report Guidelines, Goals
The plan includes several guiding principles, such as:
- Achieving interoperability;
- Empowering patients;
- Fostering flexibility;
- Focusing on value;
- Protecting privacy and security; and
- Simplifying requirements (Gold, "Morning eHealth," Politico, 11/14).
In addition, the report outlines health IT and quality care goals that ONC hopes to achieve over a three-, six- and 10-year time periods. The report states:
- By 2017, ONC will work with industry stakeholders to better align quality reporting programs and establish universal standard performance indicators, such as preventable hospital readmissions;
- By 2020, clinical data will be standardized and optimized to be aggregated and shared across interoperable systems (Miliard, Healthcare IT News, 11/17); and
- By 2024, a quality improvement ecosystem will have been achieved and the health IT infrastructure will be fully interoperable with real-time data feeds, information exchange and communication among all stakeholders (Hall, FierceHealthIT, 11/14).
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