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Remarks to HIMSS19 Global Conference & Exhibition

Alex M. Azar II
HIMSS19 Global Conference & Exhibition
February 12, 2019
Video message

Our approach to health IT is defined by a rejection of micromanagement and an openness to entrepreneurship. We cannot build a value-based healthcare system without advanced health IT, and we cannot advance health IT without your bold ideas and creative thinking.

Hello, I’m Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

It’s a pleasure to get to address the HIMSS conference this year. I’m sorry I couldn’t be with all of you in person.

But I’m excited to speak with all of you, because HIMSS is a remarkable gathering of tech entrepreneurs, healthcare providers, policy experts, and other important players, all of whom are advancing American healthcare.

This week has already been a momentous time for health IT. Just yesterday, as many of you know, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposed major new policies that will help build an interoperable, patient-focused healthcare system.

These proposals contain a number of historic steps forward, and I want to highlight just a few key points. Maybe most important, we’ve proposed enabling individual patients to securely and easily access their electronic health information, when and where they want, including by using applications on their smartphones. We’re doing this through ONC’s proposed exceptions to information blocking as well as a requirement for the use of standards-based APIs.

We believe empowering patients with this access will help build an ecosystem of applications that can improve both patient care and population health. Importantly, requiring the use of shared standards and allowing health information to be aggregated will also reduce burdens on providers.

Putting that data in the hands of patients and physicians is going to be essential to building a healthcare system that pays for value rather than procedures, one of the four priorities I have laid out as Secretary. My senior advisor for value-based transformation, Adam Boehler, has laid out four avenues for this transformation, four Ps. The first one of the four Ps is to empower patients to drive value as consumers.

Patients cannot act as consumers and they cannot drive value without easy access to information about their health.

A better health information ecosystem will also help us move forward on the three other Ps: providers working as accountable navigators of healthcare, paying for outcomes, and preventing disease before it occurs or progresses.

It was about a year ago that I identified health IT as one of the key elements for value-based transformation. Around that same time, Jared Kushner of the Office of American Innovation and CMS Administrator Seema Verma announced the administration-wide My-Health-E-Data initiative, which aims to put patients in charge of their health data. That was followed with Blue Button 2.0, which allowed patients to give private app developers access to their Medicare claims data for the first time, drawing interest from more than 1,400 tech companies. This week, CMS proposing expanding this kind of patient access to data to Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, CHIP, and Affordable Care Act plans.

In the proposals we put out this week, we also raised some questions about where we could be headed next. One possibility is the idea of including price information within the definition of electronic health information, enabling health IT to help give patients access to real, useful prices in healthcare, a goal President Trump laid out in his State of the Union address last week.

Throughout this week, you’ll hear not only from Administrator Verma, but also from other leaders across HHS, including Don Rucker, our National Coordinator for Health IT; Ed Simcox, our Chief Technology Officer; and Roger Severino, head of our Office for Civil Rights. They’re all working together to advance health IT innovation while also ensuring we have high standards for security and privacy.

I want to encourage all of you to engage with these leaders, and engage with all of us at HHS.

Our approach to health IT is defined by a rejection of micromanagement and an openness to entrepreneurship.

We cannot build a value-based healthcare system without advanced health IT, and we cannot advance health IT without your bold ideas and creative thinking. We’ll lay down sensible rules of the road, and you take it from there.

That makes all of you vital to the future of American healthcare, and essential partners in advancing HHS’s mission to improve the health and well-being of every American.

Thank you again for inviting me to address you, and I wish you all a productive rest of the conference.

Content created by Speechwriting and Editorial Division 
Content last reviewed on February 12, 2019