Americans need and deserve health information technology (IT). As the chairman and CEO of Verizon Communications Inc. and the only business representative on a federal commission to develop a strategy for health care IT standards, I have spent considerable time over the past several years promoting this technological necessity.  
In addition, Verizon helped found an unprecedented, […]

Today’s new Health Wonk Review rounds up posts from the political (would an Obama presidency energize young adults to demand entitlement reform?) to the analytical (John Wennberg’s practice variation work, the Medicare SGR debate, and more). This latest compendium of the best of health policy blogging is hosted today by Merrill Goozner of GoozNews, with great insights from […]

A report highlighting the failure of many regional health information exchanges was Health Affairs’ most-read article in December. Then in January, the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) published another discouraging assessment on the progress of these collaboratives and of the national infrastructure envisaged in the 2004 presidential order that called for wiring the health system in […]

Galaxies ago, in a decade far, far away, genius entrepreneur Jim Clark launched Healtheon on the premise that one giant Internet portal could unscramble all of health care’s tangled lines of communication, rectify its inefficiencies, and soothe its troubled soul in one brilliant masterstroke. It sounded good. The Internet was young, and people believe what […]

Will health information technology (IT) be the silver bullet to create value in the health care sector? Michael O. Leavitt, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) discusses health IT and other health system management issues in an interview with Leonard Schaeffer, founding chairman and CEO of WellPoint, Inc., and currently […]

Editor’s Note: Lammot du Pont, and Helen Pfister of Manatt Health Solutions are also coauthors of this post. The post is an edited version of a longer article written with guidance and support from the California HealthCare Foundation; the Community Clinics Initiative, a project of Tides and the California Endowment; the Colorado Health Foundation; and the RCHN Community Health Foundation.
As the health care industry […]

The Santa Barbara County Care Data Exchange was one of the most ambitious and publicized health data collection experiments in the country. But ten years after its inception, the project failed. At a time when the United States is seeking to expand the use of interoperable health information technology (IT) through regional data exchanges, what […]

It was probably a burden that HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt could bear to have Pete Stark casting aspersions on Leavitt’s plan to privatize the American Health Information Community (AHIC). It’s going to be tougher, though, for Secretary Leavitt to buck a bipartisan Senate bill that would put AHIC under Congress’s wing and forestall privatization.
The Senate […]

Orthodoxies rust easily. Even a benign truth — like the desirability of evidence-based medicine or health information technology — will decay if it is repeated too often or invested with an aura of magical infallibility. So the world needs Jerome Groopman.
An M.D. and Harvard professor who writes for the New Yorker, Groopman is creating a […]

Alan Weil, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy, interviewed Tennessee’s governor Phil Bredesen on health care, health information technology, and the challenges of changing a massive system with many moving parts. In the full interview, published yesterday in Health Affairs online, the governor talks about his involvement in the State Alliance […]

While physicians who have embraced e-prescribing wouldn’t go back to paper prescriptions, they report major barriers to using advanced e-prescribing features that many advocates believe offer the greatest potential to improve the safety and quality of health care, according to a study (free access through April 16) by Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) […]

Two recent events in this winter’s panoply of D.C. health policy conferences stand out, largely because they invite us to think about a host of problems that beset our health care system in a new way; but also because they raise two nettlesome issues. One event was convened by Health Affairs to highlight a core […]

New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg spoke passionately today calling for “an overhaul of the health care system” to “solve the problem of the 16s”—that is, 16 percent of U.S gross domestic product spent on health care and 16 percent of Americans without insurance coverage. Mayor Bloomberg, sounding very presidential at the lunchtime keynote […]

Many reports on health information technology in the past few years tell a tale of a dream deferred — standard-setting deadlines blown, adoption targets undershot, groundswells of demand dematerializing. But in the alternate world of large, integrated health plans, where the better angels of our troubled system’s nature may be said to reside, some of […]

It’s Health Wonk Review week! Oh, and the State of the Union was delivered, too. Even though the deadline for entries to this edition of the best of health policy blogging was 9 am the morning after, many bloggers were already debating the president’s foray into health reform.
The President’s plan. Robert Laszewski on the new Health […]

Two kinds of American exceptionalism emerged from last week’s release of the Commonwealth Fund’s International Health Policy Survey, which focused on primary care and was published November 2 on the Health Affairs Web site.

While about one-quarter of physicians were using an electronic health record (EHR) as of 2005, fewer than one in ten physicians were using EHRs with functionalities such as electronic prescribing, researchers say in a Health Affairs article published yesterday [2-week free access] online and reported in today’s Washington Post.