About: Overview

The Blueprint explains the role of health IT in addressing our nation’s most pressing healthcare challenges, presents our shared vision for transforming healthcare through information and information technology, and presents the work of the five committees involved in the Blueprint’s development.

Each of the five focus areas presents guiding principles; and four of the five areas provide broad strategies and specific actions each stakeholder can take to accelerate change and improve the quality, safety and efficiency of healthcare through health IT and health information exchange. In terms of the timelines associated with those specific actions, those who participated in the development processes agreed that timelines are generally needed to support action and track progress, but also agreed that timelines should be considered and discussed. More feedback is encouraged as stakeholders begin to consider implementation.

The introduction to each of the focus areas describes the area and reviews any issues on which consensus was not achieved, as well as other topics that were the subject of significant discussion during the development process. Finally, each area also contains an overview of key initiatives already underway, and a list of resources that contain more information.

Because of the dynamic nature of the healthcare system and all of its component parts, the Blueprint is intended to be a living document. eHI will maintain it in a manner that reflects progress and shifts in the industry and political environment over time. In this way, it is our hope that the Blueprint can continue to unite and coordinate the voices of individual stakeholders into a chorus of unified action. The ongoing evolution of the Blueprint can be tracked at this site.