President Bush has issued an executive order calling for health programs sponsored or administered by the federal government–or those offered by federal contractors–to use recognizable interoperability standards when developing or buying health IT systems and to become more transparent regarding the quality of services and costs.
The programs covered in the order are the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program, the Medicare program, programs operated directly by the Indian Health Service, the TRICARE program for the Department of Defense and other uniformed services, and the health care program operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The order calls on these programs to measure the quality of health services provided, aggregate that information for quality measurement and make it available to health care beneficiaries –and ultimately, to become fully interoperable according to standards set by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The programs should also develop information on the cost of common services and treatments and identify approaches that encourage and help the provision and receipt of high-quality and efficient health care through, for example, pay-for-performance models of reimbursement, the order said.
It said the programs should make consumer-directed health care insurance products available, and that all these provisions are to be carried out without additional resources,
and subject to the availability of appropriations.
Effective January 1, 2007, the order is to be implemented in new contracts or new contract cycles if they are to be renewed.
