Federal Healthcare IT Initiatives

We will dedicate a lot of time and effort here on Technovation Talks to Healthcare related topics. As you might have deduced from our previous posts, we're trying to frame a wide spectrum of Healthcare innovations as "Intelligent Healthcare."  As was the case in our last post on Politics, Healthcare is a field entirely driven by data, including:

• Diagnostic data
• Practice related data (prognostics)
• Research data

In Healthcare, we need data from the patient, data from the hospital as well as access to the larger community of accumulated medical knowledge.  The more accurate the data, the better the outcomes tend to become. Also, you may have noticed that Healthcare itself is perhaps the most critical issue in politics today. Regardless of which party or philosophy you follow - there is a universal underlying truth about why Healthcare is so important today - cost. The cost of Healthcare is out of control, so much so that it threatens not just the ability for most Americans to get the care they need, but it is also endangering the federal budget and programs such as Medicare hang in the balance as our leaders struggle to find ways to contain costs.

We believe that technology is likely the one and only avenue towards achieving costs savings in Healthcare and we will discuss this in some depth as we progress. However, today we wanted to highlight some Healthcare initiatives taken at the Federal level over the past several years. The diagram below illustrates the scope of related Healthcare technology trends and initiatives both from a Federal and an industry perspective. It by no means captures the full-spectrum of what’s going on in the larger Healthcare community, but it does capture the key focal points as of today. Intelligent Healthcare can be applied in nearly all of these initiative categories.

Healthcare Initiatives have one thread in common - a dependence on data

We will define the following Healthcare initiatives in upcoming posts:

• AHLTA
• NHIN
• VISTA
• AHRQ
• HIE
• Clinical Ontology

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