FarzadMostashari, M.D. gives keynote address at HCI Executive Summit“Beginning last month, April 18, we saw the first attestations,” Mostashari noted. “And we’re going to have this month, payments for meaningful use. It’s not going to be months and months and months before people even know whether they qualified; the vast, vast majority of folks who attempted to attest for meaningful use will get payments within a month,” he noted. “It’s amazing.”Speaking more broadly, Mostashari said he believes that as electronic health record (EHR) implementations accelerate under the push towards meaningful use, healthcare performance improvement and information technology development will increasingly reinforce and enhance each other. “I think we’re starting to catch a virtuous cycle, where the information systems support things like population health management and quality improvement,” he said, adding that “We’re advancing by 10 percent a year on EHR implementation. And we’re shortly about to reach a tipping point, where there’s a business case for adoption,” such as when individual physicians will at some point soon refuse to share referral channels with doctors who resist implementing EHRs, as it will eventually become a financial burden for physicians when their physician colleagues burden them with non-automated tasks to perform.Mostashari laid out for his audience what he called ONC’s overall five-year plan across five key domains. Among the top priorities for ONC in the near term, he said, will be:
- achieving adoption and information exchange through the meaningful use of health information technology;
- improving care for individuals, improving population health, and reducing healthcare costs through the use of HIT;
- inspiring confidence and trust in HIT;
- empowering individuals [consumers] with HIT to improve their health and the healthcare system;
- achieving rapid learning and technological advancement.