Government agencies and health plans are taking small steps toward collaboration on "meaningful use" health IT projects, according to a panel of experts who spoke at the Brookings Institute on May 14.

A portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provides funding for physician adoption of electronic health records, provided they are put to "meaningful use," such as post-market surveillance of vaccines and monitoring treatments and outcomes for diseases.

"There's a lot of activity around being able to feed those governed, patient-owned data with information from the clinical system," said Farzad Mostashari, senior advisor for policy and programs with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, HHS.

"There is more that we can do on that basis, but was also have to think about more the other way: How can we push patient observations and patient data in a way that is accessible to and influences clinical care. There are work-flow problems with this, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't try," he added.

Most panelists admitted some frustration with standardizing data, taxonomies and terminology in order to make data more shareable, but said they were encouraged by early progress.  

Andrew McLaughlin, deputy chief technology officer within the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the administration has focused on policy that ensures data privacy and security and coordinated data sharing across different formats. "There are a vast number of uses and applications of data that we want to be able to take advantage of," said McLaughlin, adding that he has concern about the speed with which health IT infrastructure is being developed.

"The one thing that scares me about all of this is that we're attempting to do what the Internet did over the course of about three decades in an extraordinarily compressed period of time. And that is a matter of some concern," said McLaughlin. "It means that modesty, and humility, and a tolerance for trial and error, and some failure is going to be necessary."

McLaughlin added that while some degree of failure may be inevitable, with healthcare failure is not acceptable. Failure in the process could lead to misdiagnosis, mistreatment or could be ultimately fatal. This could also errode public confidence in the entire initiative. 

For more:
- listen to audio from the Brookings event

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