Brailer: Information management key to advance of health IT

Speaking this week at the AHIMA conference in Denver, David Brailer, MD, former national coordinator for health information technology, said that the advance of health IT nationally will largely depend on work to be done in the private sector rather than in the government. And one of the specific challenges facing the industry is to assure that the benefits of health IT are seen by patients and consumers. Health information management (HIM) professionals can play a big part by working to guarantee that clinicians have the information they need in a secure and timely fashion and that it is accurate and applied to advance patient care, he said. Toward these goals, Brailer put it to attendees to confront a number of challenges such as assuring that health information is complete, accurate, and fast; making available healthcare cost information for consumers to enable them to compare; making health information portable; and undertaking efforts to assure that healthcare information is secure.