eHealth Initiative 2020 Roadmap Seeks To Address ‘Government Gridlock’

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | November 14, 2014

With interoperability challenges continuing to plague the healthcare industry and impatience growing among consumers and providers, the eHealth Initiative on Thursday announced the first set of priorities for its 2020 Roadmap designed to “enable coordinated efforts by public and private sector organizations to transform care delivery through data exchange and health information technology.”

The roadmap focuses on three priorities: interoperability, business and clinical motivators, and data access and use. Each focus area includes a set of short-term goals for collaborative action. Among the goals are recommendations for development and testing of data standards in the private sector “rather than mandating untested tools” and “developing incentives in the private sector to move the market rather than looking to the government for funding,” as well as “having vendors work together to harmonize tools and applications so that patients can move information from place to place.”  While the government “has been and will always be a critical part of the conversation and an engine to move things forward, the private sector really needs to lead the way in solving many of these problems,” Jennifer Covich Bordenick, CEO of the eHealth Initiative, told a Nov. 13 media briefing.

“Consumers and providers see technology work in other areas like banking, travel, and service industries and they don’t understand why it doesn’t work in healthcare,” said Bordenick. “We’ve seen a lot of government action—the passage of the HITECH Act and the Affordable Care Act. A tremendous amount of money, time and resources has been invested in technology efforts...