The HITECH Era in Retrospect

At a high level, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 accomplished something miraculous: the vast majority of U.S. hospitals and physicians are now active users of electronic health record (EHR) systems. No other sector of the U.S. economy of similar size (one sixth of the gross domestic product) and complexity (more than 5000 hospitals and more than 500,000 physicians) has undergone such rapid computerization.

Along the way, however, we lost the hearts and minds of clinicians. We overwhelmed them with confusing layers of regulations. We tried to drive cultural change with legislation. We expected interoperability without first building the enabling tools. In a sense, we gave clinicians suboptimal cars, didn’t build roads, and then blamed them for not driving. Burdensome requirements imposed costs on providers and vendors without offering sustained benefit. These deficiencies were manifested in five key areas: usability, workflow, innovation, interoperability, and patient engagement.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) set ambitious requirements for “meaningful use” of health information technology (IT) to ensure that Medicare and Medicaid would get value from their large investment on a fixed timeline. But in the absence of business and clinical drivers for change (HITECH predated the Affordable Care Act by more than a year), meaningful use came to be used as a de facto vehicle for transforming health care delivery — a purpose for which, as a technology investment program, it was not adequate...