A Healthcare Alliance's New Voice on the Federal HIT Standards Committee

Well, I haven’t been in my first meeting yet, but it’s interesting: all of us can critique from afar, but to be actively involved in the dialogue is different. And all of us at Premier have a strong sense of what we’re hoping for, though this is our first immersion at the level of technical standards. My perception from afar right now is that I think they’re reassessing the assumptions that came into this from the start—the assumption at the beginning of this that the EHR was the panacea. And with the Affordable Care Act and other federal initiatives, the whole foundation of this may need to be reassessed. I saw some coverage of Farzad [Mostashari] saying he’s reassessing this more fundamentally and looking at the post-EHR world. And that’s exactly what I want to find out. What exactly is that guiding set of assumptions? Because it will determine where we go from here. And I’ve been in this space for a long time, and my own assumptions in this space have so fundamentally shifted over the last few years.

How have your assumptions fundamentally changed about the current evolution of healthcare information technology?

When you work for an EMR/EHR vendor, that’s your world; and that was my lens. And when I moved over to Premier and started having all sorts of c-level discussions, my perspective shifted from the EHR being everything to its being a key fundamental facilitator among others.  And [internal healthcare system reform] proving very difficult in terms of getting people aligned, changing the payment system, getting inpatient people to think like outpatient people—it all involves very deep change management stuff. And just because you have the technology, doesn’t mean you know how to use it.