Outgoing HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt authored an op-ed in the Washington Post in December about health information technology (IT). He made a critically important point: Billions of stimulus dollars and other Medicare funding for health IT largely will be wasted if the nation doesn’t have the guts to go for interoperability as well. E-prescribing, for example, doesn’t offer much value if you don’t have the interoperable ability to see what other prescriptions have been written (or what allergies or diagnoses a patient has) when you are prescribing. Leavitt’s point is, somebody just needs to bite the bullet in the new administration and set the standards. He wisely suggests that CCHIT (Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology) is already the standard-bearer for EHRs in these regards. But industry has no desire to promote an interoperability standard that would allow imaging devices, EHRs, business systems, hospitals and insurers to be truly interoperable.

P.S. Why didn’t Secretary Leavitt do this himself? (Apparently his boss didn’t want to bite the bullet and make a lot of businesses mad ….)

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