An HHS official told a gathering on Capitol Hill that he believes health information technology can help close some of the significant racial and regional disparities in care that currently exist in the U.S. health system. At present, for example, rural healthcare providers have less access to IT tools than their urban colleagues, he said.

Things could change in the future, however, courtesy of the HITECH Act and the HIT portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Both call for data collection collection on ethnicity, race and gender in order to better document care disparities. (Presumably, this will help public health planners actually do something with the data--your editor has seen many worthy public health data collection efforts end up dead-ended in a repository for far too long.)

Graham, who spoke during National Health IT Week, also talked highly of the value of mobile communications in improving care. For example, he noted that Hurricane Katrina demonstrated how mobile tech could address the health needs of minorities, as 75 percent of those impacted by Katrina had access to cell phones.

"Telemedicine should be used everywhere, not just in rural areas," Graham said. Graham added that the federal government should launch some new telemedicine initiatives within the next few weeks.

Certainly, Dr. Graham could do little but offer an overview of his philosophy and plans at a speech of this kind. Going forward, it will be fascinating to hear what specific plans he can offer for using health IT to address ethnic disparities in care--such as, perhaps, remote monitoring in homes of people with transportation issues getting to the doctor?

To learn more about Graham's speech:
- read this Healthcare IT News piece

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