Chopra takes health IT efficiency message to Silicon Valley

We know that federal CTO Aneesh Chopra is an advocate of using health IT to improve quality of care and save money, but now he's taking his message outside the healthcare arena. At the Web 2.0 Summit last week in San Francisco, Chopra explained to some hardcore Silicon Valley types that technology could immediately address the "low-hanging fruit" of healthcare, including the inefficient billing processes that eat up 17 percent of healthcare spending.

Chopra also said that much of the $1.1 billion in the economic stimulus legislation allocated to comparative effectiveness research will go toward building badly needed infrastructure for data analytics. "If you look at the retail sector, we have almost perfect market intelligence about point-of-sale transactions across Wal-Mart, so they have sophisticated algorithms to say exactly what they should be doing to optimize sales based on customer behavior," he said, Information Week reports. But, Chopra noted that just 3 percent of cancer patients in the U.S. take part in clinical trials that researchers actually could mine the database of.

Chopra did not specify how that money would be spent, but pledged "absolute commitment to privacy and voluntary participation."

For more on Chopra's address to the Web 2.0 Summit:
- check out this Information Week story [1]

Related Articles:
Federal CTO encourages innovation in health IT [2]
MGMA 2009: Emanuel avoids controversy, calls for greater use of analytics [3]
AHRQ handing out $48M in grants for comparative effectiveness research [4]