Achieving the Health IT Objectives of the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

A Framework for 'Meaningful Use' and 'Certified or Qualified' Electronic Health Records

Getting Health IT Right Under ARRA took place on April 30, 2009 at the Newseum in Washington, DC. All segments of this plenary session are available below for viewing.

Please contact Michelle Maran at the Markle Foundation for information on copying and rebroadcast permissions.

Introduction and Roadmap

(11:51 min)
Zoë Baird and Carol Diamond
Markle Foundation
Implementing ARRA

(10:30 min)
"Your terrific report…emphasizes [that] we are about health. We're about an improved health care delivery system. We understand that health information technology is a vital enabler."
David Blumenthal
Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT
United States Department of Health and Human Services
Laying the Foundation for Health Reform

(12:22 min)
"Taking advantage of this opportunity starts with thinking about the meaningful use of health IT as a means to the end of health care reform…but it also requires implementing a definition of 'meaningful use' that unifies a range of real-world efforts that go well beyond health IT."
Mark McClellan
Brookings Institution
Health IT to Achieve Higher Quality and More Affordable Health Care

(17:18 min)
"Can health IT make health care better?...The answer is yes, it can, but under the right conditions… The first is that health IT can improve health care if we ask it to improve health care, and specifically, if we actually think about the HITECH Act not as a technology program but as a health reform program… Condition number two is [that] we need to realize that high tech by itself isn't enough to affect the health care change we need, that it's a bridge to payment reform and care innovation…The third condition is, quite simply, leadership"
Todd Park
Center for American Progress
Panel Discussion: Getting Health IT Right Under ARRA (Introduction)

(3:46 min)
"The strategies that we'll talk about today… focus on three things. First, setting a crystal clear goal for IT. IT is a tool; it is not the destination. The goal is improving health, controlling the growth in costs, contributing to health outcomes for patients, improving care delivery, innovating care delivery, and doing it while we protect privacy… Second, there needs to be a forward-looking strategy for standards and certification now… And third, we have to resist the impulse to harden or make too specific technology requirements in a way that stifles both the innovation in care delivery processes and the innovation in technology."
Carol Diamond, Markle Foundation
Moderator
Panelists:
"The very notion of meaningful use probably wouldn't exist without Markle's work over these last six [or] seven years. You guys have been relentless and have included so many of us in this room… in pursuing a clear definition of asking the question, 'What is this all about? Where is it supposed to get us?' And it's not all about the technology, so I'm very pleased to support this vision."
Steven Findlay
Consumers Union
"The employers I work with have a couple of very important uses in mind. One of them is to help their employees make better health care decisions. They need information to flow across the network so that the employees can get their hands on it in various aggregated published forms [to] make better decisions about their health, about their treatments, about their doctors, about their hospitals. And we've got to stimulate that, so that, hopefully, 'meaningful use' will somehow generate that kind of information for the employees to use, and help the employers, in turn, orchestrate better health care arrangements."
David Lansky
Pacific Business Group on Health
"I'm from New York City, and I guess we tend to be impatient. We tend to be pragmatic. And this may seem contradictory. We tend to think long term and think about the vision of where we want to go. And that resonates. For me, being part of the Markle process has been fun because that's the way Markle has been thinking. Let's be pragmatic. Let's be impatient. Let's be a visionary. It all comes down to the first thing I learned at Markle. It all comes down to trust… The fact that we've got so many different organizations to sign a piece of paper, any piece of paper, on issues for which people care as deeply as this is, I think, what's impressive."
Farzad Mostashari
NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
"People die every day because we have [poor] information systems. We can do better. We should do better. And it's not that the technology's in the way; it's what we try to get the technology to do…Let's focus on doing the right things that we can do today and get a really good return on investment so that we can reinvest to the next level."
Peter Neupert
Microsoft Health Solutions Group
"I think one of the things that this document does is it really provides a clear, executable, pragmatic approach that puts some boxes around what we're trying to get done, in a fairly short time. It helps us to navigate through what the installed base looks like today. Sort of trying to maximize the opportunities that we have in creating value for patients in the country and the health care system as a whole…"
Marc Overhage
Regenstrief Institute


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