It sounds like the partnership is taking a broad approach – and also focused – with different groups working on different aspects.

Yes, broad and deep. It's one of the exciting things about the National Partnership. One of the things that brought me here was the ability to coordinate and talk across different programs, and sort of learn from some things that people have found in other programs and to try to maximize what we can get out of,  for example, in health information technology.

How did you get involved in this work?

I started as a Civil Rights litigator in California. I became the president/managing attorney of public advocates. We did class action/impact litigation on issues of discrimination and poverty. I went there because that was my passion, and I was there quite a number of years bringing a variety of different cases – some in healthcare. For example, we brought a case against Gov. Pete Wilson when he tried to take away pre-natal care from undocumented women. Some of it was in other areas, like insurance. Insurance companies were increasing premiums in underserved communities. We filed some litigation against this redlining and were actually successful. Fast-forward, I went from public advocate to Consumers Union, where, sort of halfway through, when the HITECH Act was passed, I was asked to try to figure out how get the consumer voice into California's planning activities for health information technology. So worked on that and found out that it was quite lonely. There were not many consumers asked to sit around the table and work on these activities. We worked pretty hard and were able to do a pretty good job of bringing consumer organizations that understood the importance of health IT and were willing to take some positions on it. 

You have a long list of partners.

Everybody is affected; everybody cares. And, there's a whole mess of work that needs to be done. So, partnership is the only way you can get it done.

On the healthcare IT front, what concerns you the most?

I'm not sure if there's only one overarching concern. The needs of different communities can vary. So, we are trying to get them all met. So, maybe the way to say it is my overarching concern is we have an opportunity here to build it right the first time, and I worry that we might not do that – that we may continue to look at it from partial perspectives and not recognize the entire population that needs to be served by health information technology.

Let me peel that away a little bit. In some ways we start off with this work. And, by the "we," I mean the nation starts off with this work, and looks at it largely from a provider perspective. What does the doctor need here; what does the doctor need there? But the National Partnership's vision is to have a fully engaged patient and consumer at the center of that. We focus on patient- and family-centered healthcare. So, we would be concerned about building health IT so it only looks at care coordination or transitions of care from one doctor to another, but doesn't remember that the patient needs access to that information. The patient is actually the one at the center of the care. The patient might actually have a different way of articulating what the health goal is here.