Sec. Leavitt: National HIT plan must require interoperability

In an opinion piece in the Washington Post Monday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt said that investments in health information technology will only be valuable if they enable national information exchange (Source: “Connecting the Medical Dots,” Washington Post, Dec. 22, 2008.

While Leavitt said he is optimistic that adding money for HIT to the stimulus package expected in January “could spur a critical mass of the nation's doctors to finally enter the information age," he warned that, "unless the funds are tied to standards for the interoperability of health IT systems, the expenditure could do more harm than good.”

He said he fears that systems that don’t exchange information will mean “we will only be replacing paper-based silos of medical information with more expensive, computer-based silos that are barely more useful.”