Aligning incentives to achieve health IT adoption

Pursuing a career in health care was inspired largely by my family – whether they know it or not.  My father was a biochemist and neuroscientist, my mother a dietitian and health care researcher, a sister is a physical therapist, and a cousin is a pharmacist.  My path in health care has been different from theirs, with an emphasis on health care strategy, innovative business and program development, and executive leadership of both non-profit and for-profit companies.
In my experience, one of the biggest challenges in improving the performance of our health care system is to reduce the wide and inexplicable variations in how health care is delivered and the resulting disparities in cost and quality outcomes.  At National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC), we hope to help the health care community to leverage health IT, health information exchange and sharing of best practices to make significant progress in this direction.  This is of paramount importance when we envision our loved ones or ourselves afflicted with a serious illness and subject to potentially unpredictable and uncoordinated care.
No one is more vulnerable than when they hear a dreaded diagnosis or when they find themselves in a hospital gown.  Who among us does not have stories of miraculous treatments, even cures, that can be achieved and what has gone horribly wrong and resulted in tragedy?  That in itself shows the wide variation in our experiences with the health care system.
Let’s take a breast canc...

Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - April 24, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: HIT/Health Gaming EHR health IT HIE Source Type: blogs