HEALTHY ONLINE

“The Affordable Care Act, the health care law of 2010, created a Prevention and Public Health Fund. The fund is an unprecedented investment in promoting wellness, preventing disease, and protecting against public health emergencies. Much of this work is done in partnership with states and communities, which are already using Prevention Fund dollars to help control the obesity epidemic, fight health disparities, detect and quickly respond to health threats, reduce tobacco use, train the nation's public health workforce, modernize vaccine systems, prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, increase public health programs’ effectiveness and efficiency, and improve access to behavioral health services. ….. With this investment, the Affordable Care Act helps states and the nation as a whole focus on fighting disease and illness before they happen.” – HHS.gov Sounds magnificent, doesn’t it? Section 4002 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) authorized the appropriation of $15 billion over ten years to...

How are you feeling today? Do you feel a bit under the weather? Maybe you have some aches and pains, or a miserable flu, or maybe you have some chronic condition like diabetes or asthma, or some other ailment. Perhaps you could benefit from medical attention, but then again getting medical care is so darn inconvenient and expensive and time consuming, and everybody knows that our health care system is broken, and that health care is full of carelessly infected people, who waited many months just to be pushed around, maimed and exploited by arrogant doctors who never wash their hands, before being packed onto jumbo jets that fall out of the sky on a daily basis. Obviously, something must be done, and soon, or we are all going to crash and burn, or worse, go bankrupt. Fortunately the uniquely American entrepreneurial spirit of innovation, fueled by unimaginable advances in technology, is finally galvanizing its efforts to fix the American health care tragedy, just like it fixed finance, ...

In 2004 President Bush created the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), introducing the notion that Health Information Technology (HIT) should be nationally coordinated. One of the first endeavors of ONC was the planning and design of a National Health Information Network (NHIN) as a means to facilitate the exchange of electronic health information among providers and Health Information Exchange (HIE) entities. This was, and still is, a grand vision of an interconnected health care ecosystem, inclusive of all governmental agencies and all stakeholders who in any shape or form make a living or a profit from servicing the health care needs of the nation (see image below). To prime the pump for enough electronic information to be exchanged, the new ONC made grants to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) for the creation of a Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) to assemble standards for the exchange, and to RTI to creat...