Health IT implementation plan: 'Bold incrementalism'

Farzad Mostashari, a senior official in the government's health IT office, said in a speech Tuesday that the strategy for implementing federal ehealth efforts is one of "bold incrementalism," Modern Healthcare reports. Mostashari listed as an example the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT's "approach to the health information exchange. The ONC still maintains its commitment to a proposed national health information network based on the 'query-and-response health information exchange model,' Mostashari said. And yet, federal officials realized many providers won't be ready in time to use such a full-bodied exchange to qualify for Medicare and Medicaid IT subsidy payments under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009." As a result, the office developed "a lighter-weight exchange platform" (Conn, 6/16).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.