The Collaborative Forum

Earlier this week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it awarded grants totaling $220 million to organizations across 15 communities that will be pilot sites for the comprehensive use of health information technology in transforming healthcare delivery. We should all be very heartened by this news.

In establishing this Beacon Community Program, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has taken a significant lesson from past chronic care management demonstrations. Through the advanced use of I.T. the Beacon Communities are set to tackle specific goals of improving healthcare and population health status. They will address obesity and diabetes management; preventable emergency department visits and re-hospitalizations; increased immunizations; better adherence to smoking cessation; and appropriate cancer screening guidelines, among others.

The challenge with the chronic care management pilots/demonstrations our industry has tried in the past is that—even with the greatest of intentions—the stringent design and methodology actually stifled innovation and many of these projects were therefore designed to fail.

The Beacon Community Program has a much better chance for success because it goes beyond infrastructure building and actually drives innovation to improve and transform healthcare delivery.  How will Beacon actually drive improvement?  A unique feature of the Beacon program is that this is NOT a grant or demonstration.  It is a cooperative agreement between ONC and the Beacon communities.  As such, ONC will likely play a very important role in the design, implementation, and ongoing evaluation of HIT enabled care delivery innovation.

By building and strengthening their health IT infrastructure and health information exchange capabilities, these community cooperatives should achieve measurable improvements in health care quality, safety, efficiency and population health. And who doesn’t think that’s a good idea?

Additionally, the ONC has signed on to provide a supplementary $15 million to the cooperatives for technical assistance and to evaluate the success of the program. By working closely with Beacon communities, we will all be able to benefit from “lessons learned” from this initiative.  

And who says bureaucrats can’t make good innovators, or at least enable them!

A terrific byproduct of the Beacon Community Program is the number of new jobs it will create. Federal officials expect that the 15 communities could create up to 1,100 jobs paying an average of $70,000 a year.

I think that these Beacon Communities can indeed become beacons of the kind of reform our national healthcare system can deliver. I applaud this step toward developing broader community infrastructures and creating discussions about other implications for the future of healthcare.

Greater efficiency, healthier patients and jobs-creation: seems to me that this is a recipe for real success.