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MITRE Recommends Bold Steps to Improve National Digital Healthcare

Analysis  |  By Scott Mace  
   June 04, 2021

The challenge: How to take advantage of the data while ensuring ethical use, managing security, and protecting individual rights.

"COVID-19 was our wake-up call." So begins a new 46-page report from MITRE, a nonprofit research organization and think tank advising federal and state governments.

The report recommends a national strategy for digital health while assuring equity of new digitally powered services. The report is broken into six broad goals, supported by recommended objectives outlining actions to realize each goal.

  1. Access, affordability, and utilization of universal broadband for everyone.
     
  2. A sustainable health workforce that is prepared to use new technologies to deliver person-centered, integrated quality care.
     
  3. Digital technologies empower individuals to safety and securely manage their health and well-being.
     
  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.
     
  5. A digital health ecosystem that delivers timely access to information to inform public health decision-making and action.
     
  6. Integrated governance designed for the challenges of a digital health ecosystem.
     

While digital technologies can transform healthcare, they are opening up the promise of more equitable care for underrepresented and vulnerable populations, "little is known as yet about the quality of individual care" as healthcare has shifted to remote services, according to the report.

"What is known is that the health impacts of the pandemic were experienced quite unevenly, with the negative impact borne disproportionately by people of color and those with lower incomes," the report states. "The sets of systems for detecting and responding to what became a pandemic were shown to be vulnerable. It seems clear that more data can and should be available for use across various stakeholders—the individual, care providers, public health professionals, community-based organizations, and researchers. We now need to give attention to major considerations that may have been given lower priority during the pandemic, such as how to take advantage of the data while ensuring ethical use, managing security, and protecting individual rights."

MITRE also outlined seven guiding principles for its proposed strategy:

  1. Empower the individual.
     
  2. Every community, every person is important.
     
  3. Collaborate and connect.
     
  4. The end is improved health and well-being.
     
  5. The system must learn and adapt.
     
  6. Ensure privacy, security, and accountability.
     
  7. Be bold.
     

"Prompt, decisive, strategic action is needed to ensure the resulting ecosystem is robust, efficient, and equitable," the report states. "If we let this opportunity pass, we risk worsening disparities in health by creating solutions that are only available to the privileged few."

“If we let this opportunity pass, we risk worsening disparities in health by creating solutions that are only available to the privileged few.”

Scott Mace is a contributing writer for HealthLeaders.


KEY TAKEAWAYS

MITRE recommends a national strategy for digital health while assuring equity of new digitally powered services.

The report is broken into six broad goals, supported by recommended objectives outlining actions to realize each goal.

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