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GCN Home > 09/26/06 web stories

HHS pursues transparency in health IT

By Mary Mosquera, GCN Staff

The Health and Human Services Department plans to harness the participation of physicians, hospitals, insurance plans, employers and consumers to make health care quality and prices more transparent, and to drive down overall costs.

The transparency initiative follows on an executive order President Bush issued in August that will change how the government procures health care.

“Health care costs have the capacity to erode the economy. We can no longer remain prosperous if we allow this to continue,” said HHS secretary Mike Leavitt at the third annual Health IT Summit in Washington, sponsored by the eHealth Initiative, a collaborative health care industry group. Health care costs currently account for 16 percent of the economy.

Leavitt’s goal is for the $2 trillion health care sector to organize itself into a system that measures price and quality, moving to value-based components of care. The foundation of that is to:
  • Implement standards of interoperability in connectivity
  • Determine and measure standards of quality among providers and procedures
  • Identify procedures and publish their prices for comparison
  • Establish incentives for providers to promote efficiencies in health care.
Members of the medical profession, for reasons that are financially and professionally important to them, are working to develop quality measures. And the economic community is joining with them, Leavitt said.

“I believe that within two years we will begin to see pockets of quality being measured against price, and we will begin to see value-based competition emerge in several markets around several procedures around the country,” he said.

HHS has started quality pilots in Boston, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Phoenix, San Francisco and Madison, Wis. Some of these began under an earlier initiative. But in the last year, HHS has designated these six local organizations as pilots and asked them to form a network, harmonize standards, share best practices and encourage other local quality pilots. The Hospital Quality Alliance and Physician Quality Alliance also are participating.

“We intend to go from six to 60 pilots as rapidly as we can, with no time frame, so you end up with local organizations collecting quality data and working with their physician and employer community to begin creating this combination of value and price,” Leavitt said.

More news on related topics: Health IT, Management, IT Management



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