Future of HIT: 2013 WEDI Report

Louis W. Sullivan M.D former Secretary of HHS and the creator of the “Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange” (WEDI) released the 2013 WEDI report on December 5th at a briefing held at the National Press Club in Washington D.C.

“The WEDI report is a roadmap to the future of health IT and is a culmination of a year’s work by the WEDI Steering Committee, Board of Directors, workgroups, members, and advisors,” said Devin A. Jopp, Ed.D, President and CEO of WEDI.

The report’s four focus areas stress the growing need to engage patients through improved access to data, to identify requisite business information and data exchange requirements to help enable payment models as they emerge, to identify ways to better align administrative and clinical information capture, linkage, and exchange, and identify business cases for innovative encounter models that use existing and emerging technologies.

The report identifies the innovative encounter models as email, texting, and telehealth that are used as powerful tools to engage patients and providers without reference to location or time. An important recommendation involving the mobile environment would be to identify use cases and operating standards that would promote consumer health and the ability to exchange telehealth information.

The recommendation suggests that there is a need for an environmental scan to be conducted to identify attributes of existing successful electronic encounters to encourage their use. It is also important to develop characteristics of use cases where evidence suggests that growth would be impeded. The report stresses that it is important to look at not only what is currently working but also how to mine success factors to spread the growth of these technologies.

The report also mentions that when dealing with innovation with new emerging models, it is very important to identify existing or proposed federal or state-based laws or regulations that are or may create barriers to the implementation of innovative encounters and this includes licensure.

As former HHS Secretary Louis Sullivan pointed out, “As a nation all of us must work together through organizations and partnerships to accomplish the recommendations outlined in the report. Implementation of the recommendations will begin in 2014.

For the full report, go to www.wedi.org/topics/2013-wedi-report.