About: Why a "Blueprint"?

Like healthcare, the building design and construction industry is highly information-dependent. The industry also happens to be in the middle of its own transformation in the way it creates, maintains and disseminates information.

"AutoCAD," the computer modeling software that has dominated the industry for more than 20 years, is the program architects use to create blueprints. But the AutoCAD program was created during a time when collaboration among architects, builders and engineers was thought to be a conflict of interest.²⁴ In effect, that meant that the software created asymmetries by stripping critical information from the architectural blueprint, which engineers and builders needed to execute the plan, resulting in the need to recreate that information, opening the door to errors and delays. But in the new millennium, the building design and construction industry began to change as new software programs were created that maintained the integrity of information and permitted access and use by others, thus generating significant efficiencies and improvements in quality.

There are obvious parallels to healthcare, where information asymmetries are commonplace and information tends to sit in the healthcare silos in which it was created. In healthcare, we seek to unlock that resultant flow of data to facilitate improvements in quality and efficiency.

The eHI Blueprint is modeled after the next generation of architectural blueprints, where stakeholders have access to the information they need to support their movement forward. In other words, the eHI Blueprint is not just a framework for action, but also a tool containing the consensus principles, broad strategies, specific actions and the resources that all stakeholders in healthcare can use to build the high quality and efficient healthcare system we all envision.