Excerpts from Secretary Mike Leavitt’s Letters on Value-Driven Health Care

Dear Colleague:

I am writing to invite you to play a leadership role in the movement toward improving the quality and affordability of health care through value-driven health care purchasing. We all celebrate the advances in medicine that help us live longer and healthier lives. At the same time, we also know the challenges that our health care sector faces and realize that our health care dollars could be spent more effectively.

This past August, President Bush signed Executive Order 13410, committing federal health programs to provide meaningful, consistent information on both the quality and price of health care services. Under this initiative, federal government agencies that sponsor health care programs will lead the drive to adoption of interoperable health information technology, and participants in federal health care programs will have greater access to quality and price information about the health care they receive. By making this information available, all stakeholders in the health care system will have better tools and incentives to improve care and maximize the value of their healthcare purchases.

I am asking you to support the four “cornerstone” actions of the recent Executive Order – interoperable health IT; transparency of quality; transparency of price; and incentives for high value health care, thus building upon the good work already underway by the private sector and by broad-based public-private collaborations. I hope you will consider endorsing these principles. I have enclosed a brochure that provides a brief overview of this effort and will shortly be sending a state “toolkit” with additional resources that you may find helpful.

I encourage you to support the transformation of our healthcare system through the four cornerstones of value-driven health care by signing the Purchaser Statement of Support. This Statement of Support and other useful information can be found in this packet or online at: www.hhs.gov/transparency. If you have further questions, please contact HHS Value-driven Health Care at (202) 205-5552 or valuedriven@hhs.gov.

Sincerely,

Michael O. Leavitt
Secretary of Health and Human Services