Consumers are at the heart of IT efforts, top official says

The common denominator driving the Obama administration's push for widespread use of electronic health records, smart meters and downloadable agency statistics is consumer empowerment, the top federal technology official said on Monday.

All three initiatives are intended to equip citizens with information that can help them make better life decisions, federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra told attendees of a health information technology conference sponsored by the eHealth Initiative, an independent organization that works to improve health care through IT.

"2010 will be the year of implementation and results," Chopra said. "This will be the year we are going to see . . . newer products, services, tools and capabilities -- changes in the plumbing of our industry."

The government is supporting the deployment of smart meters -- gadgets that electronically transmit information about a building's energy consumption to utility companies or consumers -- with hundreds of millions of Recovery Act dollars, and is encouraging the use of e-health records with nearly $20 billion in stimulus spending. The budget has yet to be determined for open government initiatives, such as searchable, high-value data sets that list funding opportunities, hold the government accountable, detail an agency's work or meet some other citizen requirement.

Chopra became familiar with health IT while serving as managing director for the health care consultancy Advisory Board Co., which was founded by David Bradley, who owns Atlantic Media Co., publisher of Nextgov.

"How many of you know that there is a parallel to the health IT stimulus," Chopra asked. "It's called the smart meter stimulus." Advocates say smart meters give consumers information that will lead them to use electricity more wisely, thereby saving energy and money.

"So let me ask you a question: How are you going to access that information to change your behavior? . . . And what the heck would you do when you see it?" Chopra said. "The same logic that applies to that question applies to health IT. If you liberate the data from the organization, and you allow it to be utilized in ways you can't conceive, great things will happen."

Supporters say e-health records allow patients to take an active role in coordinating their care and tracking their progress, thereby saving their lives. For example, aggregate data drawn from e-health records can be used to compare the effectiveness of treatments and monitor the quality of care at the doctors' offices.

"We will start to see new ways of consuming and benefiting from that information," Chopra said.

"Open government has the same principles," he said. Case in point: Citizens, including Chopra, are unwittingly tapping into federal data when they monitor their caloric intake using the popular "Lose It" phone application.

"I go to Starbucks . . . log in excess calories that I'm consuming so that I can hopefully reduce my intake -- Lose It is based on an [Agriculture Department] database," Chopra said.