The advocacy organization Health IT Now has revealed plans to relaunch with a broader focus, and it's changing its name to "Health Innovation Alliance" to reflect this vision.
Four notes:
1. Health IT Now is a coalition of patient groups, provider organizations, health payers and health IT companies, including Aetna, athenahealth, Oracle and Teladoc.
2. As Health IT Now, the group has supported efforts to improve patient care with data and health IT for more than a decade — such as advocating for landmark legislation like the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health, or HITECH, Act.
3. Under the organization's relaunch, the Health Innovation Alliance will add new members, unveil a new logo and update its list of priorities with newfound focus on modernizing HIPAA, promoting patient-centric care and developing an agile regulatory framework.
4. Joel White, executive director of Health IT Now, released the following statement on the organization's relaunch:
"When I worked alongside former Sen. John Breaux, D-La., and former Congresswoman Nancy Johnson, R-Conn., to launch Health IT Now more than a decade ago, the health IT landscape was quite different. We set out to encourage the uptake of EHRs, to bolster the work of the ONC — then in its infancy — and to build support for what would become known as the HITECH Act in 2009.
"Fast forward to today and the original goals of our coalition have been largely realized … In short, we have attained 'health IT now,' [and] what we still lack is meaningful innovation in how federal programs harness that technology to lower costs and improve health outcomes. Our rebranded Health Innovation Alliance … will be uniquely positioned to tackle this challenge."