Strategic Initiatives

The eHealth Initiative is an independent, non-profit, multi-stakeholder organization that is raising national and grassroots awareness of the value of the responsible use of electronic health information in addressing our nation’s most pressing health care challenges, including those related to quality, safety, efficiency, and access.

While significant dollars are spent each year to both measure and improve care, conduct research, monitor the safety of medical products, track public health threats, and manage chronic disease, to date very few of these initiatives leverage the use of electronic clinical health information that currently resides in physician offices, health plans, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies and other health care-related organizations.

Leveraging this electronic health information--while effectively managing privacy and security through adherence to a common framework for information sharing that builds trust--will result in vast improvements in the health of the U.S. population.

With support from national leaders across every sector of health care, the eHealth Initiative is increasing understanding by public and private sector leaders—across every sector of health care, of how these current health care-related processes can be significantly improved by using electronic health information, thereby creating a set of “business cases” and a sustainable model for using health IT and health information exchange to improve health and health care in the United States.

Building a trusted, distributed, electronic health information infrastructure will not only transform care delivery, but also help our nation’s healthcare system more effectively measure and improve healthcare quality and efficiency, manage chronic conditions, monitor the safety of medical products, track public health threats and support the expansion of the evidence base of which treatments work best for specific diseases and conditions—to support comparative effectiveness studies. Finally, this same electronic health information infrastructure will help consumers and patients more effectively navigate an increasingly complicated healthcare system.

The eHealth Initiative is initially focusing on the following four key areas, providing an environmental scan of what’s happening, identifying best practices, supporting “learning laboratories”, and creating an environment for sharing learning and insights among pioneers who are effectively using electronic health information to support these key healthcare areas:

Continue to check our web site for the results of new activity and research in each of these areas, which is being posted over the next two weeks.