WASHINGTON – Technology alone can't fix the nation's ailing healthcare system, the Center for American Progress concludes. 

In a new report, the nonpartisan think tank is urging leaders to wed healthcare information technology to care delivery innovation and payment reform.

The $19 billion health information technology investment authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's HITECH program presents a landmark opportunity to catalyze improvement of the nation's healthcare system, the report notes. This key piece of President Barack Obama's policy agenda encourages doctors and hospitals to embrace health IT solutions in order to strengthen and modernize the infrastructure upon which the healthcare system runs.

"This critical health IT investment program will fail, however, if it is treated as a pure technology implementation program," the report says. "Indeed, failure is effectively guaranteed if the HITECH program embraces technology adoption for the sake of adoption. But if this new health IT investment program is wedded to a strong commitment to provider payment reform in forthcoming healthcare reform legislation and implemented specifically as an accelerator of healthcare delivery innovation and payment reform, then the investment program can help transform U.S. healthcare as we know it."

The center calls for the following in tandem with the adoption of IT systems:

A results-oriented standard for the "meaningful use" of health IT. The initial standard for "meaningful use" should focus on uses of health IT that will actually help improve care and accelerate payment reform:

• Tracking key patient-level clinical information to give healthcare providers clear visibility into the health status of their patient populations
• Applying clinical decision support designed by healthcare providers to help improve adherence to evidence-based best practices
• Executing electronic healthcare transactions (prescriptions, receipt of drug formulary information, eligibility checking, lab results, basic patient summary data exchange) with key stakeholders
• Reporting a focused set of meaningful care outcomes and evidence-based process metrics (for example, the percentage of patients with hypertension whose blood pressure is under control), which will be required by virtually any conceivable new value-based payment regimes.

Widespread achievement of "meaningful use" by healthcare providers. This process should be driven in significant part by a results-oriented implementation of HITECH's Regional Health Information Technology Extension Centers program. Many providers, particularly small practices and "safety net" healthcare providers who serve the underserved, lack the expertise and resources to purchase, install and use information technology to innovate care. HITECH provides for the creation of Regional Health IT Extension Centers, or RHITECs, that could be structured to meet this need for up to 200,000 physicians, if empowered appropriately.

Tight coordination of the health IT program with provider payment reform. The advance of health IT and payment reform should be executed in close coordination. The quality metrics desired by Medicare to power payment reform should directly inform the definition of "meaningful use." In turn, the data collected via the spread of "meaningfully used" health IT should help power the development and refinement of reformed payment models.