If you’ve heard me speak in the past few months, you’ll know that the focus of my remarks is primarily on ONC’s mission to achieve nationwide interoperability and reduce clinician burden relative to health IT.  I emphasize these areas because they are absolutely critical to the health of Americans using our healthcare system.

Health information technology (health IT) has come a long way since Hurricane Katrina came roaring ashore in 2005.  At that time, few hospitals in the region had adopted electronic health records (EHRs).  To address some coordination issues, a national foundation comprised of several private businesses, national physician organizations, and other health professionals stood up a basic system to share medication history with providers in a matter of hours. This system, KatrinaHealth.org, was helpful in limited circumstances;