Last week in Orlando, Florida, some of the most innovative Health IT minds gathered for the HIMSS 2014 Conference to share ideas for improved health care delivery and industry success. One of the conference’s biggest draws, was a keynote speech delivered by Hilary Clinton. She praised the conference and its historically ground-breaking success to a room overflowing with people. She pointed out that HIMSS has inspired innumerable IT innovations that have lead to increased efficiency in medicine, improved quality of care and decreased costs over the last 50 years.
Clinton’s goal in the senate was to promote EHRs, which most health care providers across the country have transitioned to over the last year. EHR systems make keeping medical records straight and accessible more seamless, improving care delivery and changing patient access to their records. She notes that seeing this transformation first-hand has lead her to recognizing more room for improvement in the system.
She commented saying, “We need more transparency in our health care system. We need to drive improvements in health IT to make it easier to get data on how much treatments cost so providers, payers and consumers can make better, more informed decisions. But if things aren’t working, we need people of good faith to come together and make evidence based changes.”
Transparency alone will not necessarily improve care, lower costs or expand coverage to those that need it, but health IT and more robust data will help us to gain better insight into the most efficient ways to reach those goals. It makes sense that with improved technology will come more valuable data which is followed by a better understanding of the health care and patient landscapes, giving price transparency power-players like ourselves (shameless bragging) the ability to enact change.
Cheers to all those at HIMSS 2014 this year, we are looking forward to forging the path towards affordable care, price transparency and quality-based health care consumerism.
