Karen DeSalvo: 5 necessities to reach interoperability

The U.S. healthcare system isn’t a catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina, but it’s a slow boil, Karen DeSalvo, National Coordinator for Health IT, said Thursday during Health Care Innovation Day in Washington, D.C.

“The pain is greater and greater, breaking the bank for many Americans,” DeSalvo (pictured) said to open the event, hosted by West Health Institute and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.

Citing her experience as the City of New Orleans Health Commissioner in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, DeSalvo said she knows what it’s like to build a system from the ground up. And health IT was at the foundation of all of the city’s work.

“We began to plan. We needed to do better; it was about having information at hand for doctors,” DeSalvo said. “We needed to understand population health.”

DeSalvo stressed the importance of population health at January’s Health IT Policy Committee meeting.

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