title: An early status report on the Beacon Communities' plans for transformation via health information technology.
abstract: The Beacon Community Program is part of a federal strategy for using health information technology as a foundation to improve the nation's health care system. In particular, Beacon Communities seek to increase the quality and efficiency of health care, improve the health of individuals and communities, and inform similar initiatives in other parts of the country. Each Beacon Community has set quality, efficiency, and health-related goals, and each is deploying multiple technology-enabled interventions to achieve them. Yet achieving large-scale and sustainable health care improvement also requires an implementation framework that can foster innovation and continuous learning from results. Based on the early experiences of the seventeen diverse Beacon Communities, this paper describes program design features that characterize how these initiatives are organized.
authors.affiliation: Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, DC, USA. aaron.mckethan@hhs.gov
authors.forename: Aaron
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: McKethan
authors.forename: Craig
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Brammer
authors.forename: Parastou
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Fatemi
authors.forename: Minyoung
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Janhavi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kirtane
authors.forename: Jason
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kunzman
authors.forename: Shaline
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Rao
authors.forename: Sachin H
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Jain
mesh_terms: D004059:Diffusion of Innovation; D008490:Medical Informatics; D016730:Program Development; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D014481:United States