![Transforming Health Care: The Role of Health IT [image courtesy Bipartisan Policy Center]](http://www.cccblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/transforminghealthcare.jpg "Transforming Health Care: The Role of Health IT [image courtesy Bipartisan Policy Center]")
The Bipartisan Policy Center released a report last Friday — Transforming Health Care: The Role of Health IT – emphasizing the critically important role that health information technology plays “in supporting new models of care and payment designed to achieve health care’s triple aim” of improving health, improving the experience of care for patients and families, and reducing the cost of care. In the report — whose contributors include leading health care experts from around the country — the Bipartisan Policy Center concludes, ”despite the introduction of IT to nearly every other aspect of modern life, the U.S. health care system remains largely paper-based.”
The report identifies six common attributes regarding health IT: an organization-wide focus on the needs of the patient; strong organizational and clinical leadership; access to information to support efficient, coordinated care; timely access to care; emphasis on prevention, wellness, and healthy behaviors; and accountability, alignment of incentives, and payment reform.
And it further highlights six important challenges — “gaps in and barriers to achieving health IT capabilities” — that must be overcome in order to support these common attributes. Among them, a lack of health information exchange (after the jump):
