IBM’s Keith Salzman: Health IT Platforms Should Be Designed With Cybersecurity in Mind

Keith Salzman, chief medical information officer for global business services at IBM’s federal business, has said that health information technology platforms should be designed for users and should be equipped with cybersecurity tools and features that protect privacy in order to realize the benefits of health care digitization.

Salzman told Dan Chenok, executive director of IBM’s Center for the Business of Government, in an interview published Monday that health IT systems should be “standardized as a rule with variance as a relatively rare exception.”

He also called on the Office of National Coordinator for Health IT to advance “coordination” among government agencies to facilitate interoperability in the delivery of health care services.

Salzman said the adoption of electronic health records seeks to streamline the integration of external data into federal agencies’ data stores and drive the use of analytics in order to get a clear view of a patient’s medical status.

Industry should set up a national patient identifier, align resources with health determinants to ramp up citizen health’s impact and address tort litigation as part of health care reform efforts, he added.