Bredesen eHealth agenda approaches milestone

Governor Phil Bredesen has carved-out a leadership role the past few years in eHealth, and has focused on e-prescribing as a point of leverage -- a key to improving care, increasing safety and reducing pharmaceutical expenditures. On Aug. 6, Co-Chair Bredesen convened his eHealth Alliance task force under the aegis of the National Governors Association. Out of that meeting came word of plans to unveil the Alliance's first national report in a Washington, D.C., meeting Sept. 25-26. Prior to that, on Sept. 18, the Governor's own eHealth Advisory Council, chaired by Antoine Agassi of Cogent Healthcare, will convene and may have access to the national report. During last week's meeting, e-prescribing met a little competition for priority with privacy-security and quality-of-care issues. The Bredesen-led group will sort all that out before launching proposed "academies" for training state eHealth leadership teams. A bit of last week's agenda was devoted to discussion of how best to communicate to the next President's Administration the need for an aggressive White House-level push on eHealth, as well as for congressional funding of the virtual mandate. Video of the Aug. 6 meeting is archived here (use the Play buttons in the Agenda frame, not the buttons on the media player.)