ONC Annual Meeting
At the February 2015 ONC Annual Meeting, titled "Interoperable Health IT for a Healthy Nation," National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, told attendees that the agency's focus is moving beyond meaningful use, toward interoperability and outcomes. This includes building out the IT infrastructure that will support health reform and enable better population health management.

A highlight of the ONC Annual Meeting was having all of the former national coordinators talk about the national state of health IT in the past, present and future.

David Brailer, MD, the nation's first national coordinator, said the industry won't be able to accomplish appropriate risk management, population health management or payment reform without interoperability. The ONC leaders shared a strong consensus that the intelligent use of technology will prevail in realizing population health goals.

Meaningful use is not dead
Despite the notion that it may be time to move beyond meaningful use, the program continues to drive electronic health record adoption, organizations have built incentive payments into their IT budgets and we continue to see program improvements.

At the time of this writing, proposed rules for Stage 3 meaningful user and 2015 Edition Standards and Certification Criteria were at the Office of Management and Budget for final review. The OMB announced of the proposed rules that "Stage 3 will focus on improving health care outcomes and further advance interoperability."

Additional recent policy adjustments instituted or proposed include:

• Simplifying satisfaction of the requirement for summary of care transmissions;
• More realistic measures around the availability and actual viewing of patient information to satisfy patient engagement requirements; and
• A potential new requirement to send electronic notification of significant patient health care events to patient care teams.

Measures such as these point to the importance of data sharing and enable achievable and meaningful progress toward population health management.

Payment models increasingly emphasize population health
Payers are primary drivers toward PHM, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is accelerating its timeline for shifting Medicare to a value-based system. By the end of 2016, at least 30 percent of fee-for-service Medicare payments will be tied to value through alternative payment models such as accountable care organizations or bundled payment arrangements. By the end of 2018, that will increase to 50 percent.

As recently as 2011, Medicare made almost no payments through alternative payment models.

Among private payers, a group of major providers and insurers have formed the Health Care Transformation Task Force to shift 75 percent of operations to contracts designed to improve quality and lower costs by 2020. These very important public and private payer initiatives strongly underscore the need for critical health IT enablers of effective PHM.

Welcome to the new PHM era of health IT
We have reached an inflection point in the history of health IT, as we move beyond the HITECH era into this new era. We have come a long way in capturing health data, yet have only begun to share that data among providers, patients and payers. The opportunity ahead of us is to take major strides toward using that data to improve care and lower costs for the populace in general. We have been through an incredible decade of health IT. There is no sign of it slowing down.