Report from Massachusetts Health IT forum

To talk of a "revolution" in health care would be demeaning to the thousands of people staking their lives on real revolutions right now in various countries, but there is no doubt that the conflation of out-of-control health care costs, fancy new technologies, and various government mandates (not only from the US government, but from many states including Massachusetts) have forced doctors, vendors, and other people in the heath care field to scramble and order changes throughout their organizations. A couple hundred of these people came to the "Tools for Meaningful and Accountable Care" conference held yesterday by the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium.

I didn't interview many participants (the ones I talked to were very happy with the presentations) but I wonder whether all of them got what they came for. They may well be haggling over questions such as "How many prescriptions do we need to order online in 2011 in order to qualify for the first stage of Meaningful Use booty?" or "How do I get an image from the radiologist down the street while satisfying HIPAA privacy regulations?" What they got, however, was a broad look at the needs of health care and a set of projections by various speakers that congealed into what I find to be a coherent vision for health care in the future.

And I think the communication of this vision is important. Costs will continue to rise and reform will fail if doctors, vendors, and IT staffs simply race to meet each stage of regulations and act in an ad hoc manner without an overall coordination of effort. Just how broad this coordination of effort must be--we're not talking here just about gathering an entire hospital around a program, or even a whole consortium such as Partners HealthCare, the biggest Massachusetts provider--will come out during this article.