Sankaran: Use IT as healthcare 'force multiplier'

Speaking in Boston at the Healthcare Stimulus Exchange Roadshow, Vish Sankaran, director for the Federal Health Architecture Program, outlined his vision for the government's role in promoting broader healthcare IT adoption via the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN).

His most salient point: "We don't want the federal government to be in this business forever."

The aim, he said, is for government to "raise the bar, tip the market," and then engage with the private sector to help the healthcare IT industry to flower. One of the chief vehicles for making this happen is the CONNECT software solution, developed after 22 federal agencies collaborated to link their health IT systems to the NHIN. An open source program, CONNECT enables public and private IT systems to communicate via the NHIN, and can be downloaded and updated by anyone. Sankaran said he hoped that this sort of open-source evolution would soon "enable an ecosystem" whereby more and more entities, public and private, connected with the NHIN.