A National Strategy for Digital Health
Mitre V2 May 2021
The strategy is grounded in the following principles:
- Empower the individual.
- Every community, every person is important.
- Collaborate and connect.
- The end is improved health and well-being.
- The system must learn and adapt.
- Ensure privacy, security, and accountability.
- Be bold.
These principles were used to guide development of a strategic framework, comprising six broad goals. Each goal is supported by recommended objectives describing actions for realizing a given goal.
Goal 1: Access, affordability, and utilization of universal broadband for everyone. As the COVID-19 pandemic powerfully illustrated, digital technologies are now foundational for obtaining health services, support, and information. We must not only provide equitable access to affordable broadband, but we must also ensure individuals can use it for health-related needs as well as opportunities in education, employment, social networks, the global economy, and nearly every other facet of modern life.
Goal 2: A sustainable health workforce that is prepared to use new technologies to deliver person-centered, integrated quality care. Digital technologies will impact traditional approaches to health occupations, tasks, and functions. Ultimately, a national digital health strategy requires a trained, sufficient workforce to meet the demand, and changes in organizational cultures that lead to a team-based approach to care and the shifting “the locus of care” to empowerment of the family and home.
Goal 3: Digital technologies empower individuals to safely and securely manage their health and well-being. Digital devices and systems are needed for collecting and using data to enable coordinated, holistic, and integrated care. They must equip individuals and providers with meaningful information and enable greater engagement of individuals in their health and wellness. Foundational to meeting this goal is ensuring individuals own their data and possess sufficient digital health literacy to use it. Building on that foundation, we need to grow our collective understanding of our personal health data, better utilizing the digitally enabled approaches to care, and ensuring they result in improved quality and outcomes while reducing costs.
Goal 4: Data exchange architectures, application interfaces, and standards that put data, information, and education into the hands of those who need it, when they need it, reliably and securely. Data is the epicenter of the digital health ecosystem. There must be timely, reliable, and appropriate access, exchange, and integration of that data for various types of users: patients, clinicians, service providers, researchers, policy makers, government programs, and technology developers. This interoperability will drive information-based decisions, enhance health services, and reshape how value is defined.
Goal 5: A digital health ecosystem that delivers timely access to information to inform public health decision-making and action. It is necessary to build a digital health information ecosystem that facilitates timely and complete bidirectional data flow throughout the federated public health ecosystem, in which constitutional authority to carry out public health functions lies with state health agencies, designated larger local public health departments, tribal nations, territories, and freely associated states. This transformation will use digital technologies and data to support a responsive, resilient public health system that facilitates timely bidirectional flow of the right information among diverse stakeholders to support evidence-based decision-making.
Goal 6: Integrated governance designed for the challenges of a digital health ecosystem. Widespread reform of existing fragmented and out-of-date governance structures is necessary to actualize the benefits of digital health and to support smart and strategic investments, avoid duplication, and harmonize efforts. Industry requires comprehensive policies that (1) address data protection, privacy, information security, patient rights, and transparency; (2) establish protocols and standards to ensure interoperability and alignment of quality measures; and (3) ensure our national health security. This reform must be a holistic approach across all levels of government and encompass all stakeholders, to include health services providers, technology providers, hospitals, other primary care centers, patients, and other citizens, all of which must contribute to the development of digital health governance.
