Last month the Office of the National Coordinator's Heath IT Policy Committee unveiled a first draft of its "meaningful use" formula. That's the set of conditions healthcare providers must meet to qualify for Medicare bonuses to help cover the costs of their health IT investment under the health IT stimulus plan.

In explaining the project, Dr. Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner of the New York City Health Department, said the ONC's meaningful use workgroup had taken pains to "focus on outcomes, not software."
The more arresting outcomes the panel cited were related to improving U.S. population health. Moreover, their goals were specific: reduce the number of annual heart attacks and strokes by 1 million; and cut the rate of racial and ethnic disparity in diabetes in half.

It was a stirring moment. Laying out in hard numbers population health objectives that policy planners normally refer to only generally as "improvements" or "better health" has an inspirational effect.

"We rarely stop to look at what we could achieve," ONC leader Dr. David Blumenthal told the Health IT Policy Committee. "It requires us to look into the unknown."

It may necessary for the administration to  invoke a similar 'call-to-arms' spirit among the public if the grand experiment in health IT its about to start will succeed.

In doing so, the federal government's own investment in health IT -- often agonizingly gradual – is a palpable example. The government is busy working on projects that would readily qualify as meaningful under even the toughest criteria.

For example, the Social Security Administration has been extracting medical records of SSA benefits applicants electronically via an interface to a Virginia health information exchange. The interface was developed by agencies participating in the Federal Health Architecture community.

Although a prototype, the system has been able to collapse from months to weeks the amount of time it takes for often highly  compromised claims applicants to have their cases considered by the SSA.

Electronic access to the health and benefits information of  wounded soldiers is another poignant use of health IT the federal government has already investment thousands of dollars and man-hours on. In his first 100 days, President Obama appeared in public with his secretaries of defense and veterans affairs to issue his own call-to-arms for building a lifetime virtual record for all military personnel.

Both projects are examples what ONC's meaningful use workgroup referred to as the "north star" of its policy goals. Keeping the government's own work in this area in view could go along way toward generating the support the health IT stimulus plan will need to succeed.