eHealth Initiative Announces Official Launch
The eHealth Initiative, a consortium of 30 organizations that promotes use technology to improve health care delivery, announced its official launch yesterday. The organization, which counts CareGroup Health Care System, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Medscape, IBM and the IPA Association of America among its members, will focus on six "primary" areas:
- promoting the "promise of health care technology" through education;
- improving consumer trust and confidence in ehealth initiatives;
- promoting public and private funding of research and education;
- encouraging innovation by lobbying for "technology-neutral" laws, regulations and policies;
- supporting industry-led standards development for health care technology applications;
- working with the government to demonstrate how best to best the Internet and "other emerging technologies" to improve the health care system.
Janet Marchibroda, eHI executive director, said, "A growing number of leaders in the health care and technology industries have recognized that the time has come to develop and articulate the vision of a greatly improved health care system that is enabled -- and even transformed -- by the Internet and the other emerging technologies." Russell Ricci, general manager of IBM's Global Healthcare Industry Unit, added, "With Web-based software, hardware and implementation services, we can deliver better health care to more people, more efficiently, while helping to reduce medical errors." The initiative is holding its first policy conference, "The eHealth Policy Agenda," today in San Diego (eHealth Initiative release, 5/21).
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