Welcome to AHRQ's National Resource Center for Health Information Technology. This Web-based service is a national source of information, assistance, and real-world experience, all of which can help us reap the benefits of health IT.

AHRQ's National Resource Center for Health IT:

• Provides a broad overview of our movement toward health IT.
• Offers free, direct access to information and tools that can help individuals and organizations plan for, evaluate, and implement health IT.
• Is designed to serve clinicians, both early adopters and newcomers to health IT; health care executives and other decision makers; consumers; health care purchasers, including health plans; policy makers; vendors, researchers, and others.
• Aims to help those in the health care sector who take on the challenge of implementing health IT.
• Is committed to serving as a rich source of information and also to providing a real-world laboratory that can help organizations become more fully prepared for health IT transformation. 

AHRQ's health IT initiative is designed to help learn and share those real-world lessons. Since 2004, AHRQ has invested more than $260 million to fund more than 100 projects nationwide, all of which seek to understand the possibilities, barriers, and best practices for implementing health IT systems in many different settings, including ambulatory settings.

As we look toward achieving the benefits of health IT, we also need to understand the demands that these new tools will make. For example, to help health providers get the maximum benefit from clinical decision support systems, AHRQ in March 2008 awarded contracts to two leading academic organizations. Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Yale University in New Haven, CT, will:

• Study ways to advance our understanding of how best to incorporate clinical decision support into health care delivery.
• Demonstrate how knowledge contained in practice guidelines can be transformed into computer-based clinical decision support.
• Create a consortium to increase widespread sharing and adoption of clinical decision support across multiple ambulatory care settings and technology platforms.

Making available the lessons learned of health IT is an important goal of AHRQ's National Resource Center for Health IT. Our grantees and contractors are sources of valuable experience for many others as they implement health IT--whether in the clinic, the hospital, or in community and regional systems of health information exchange.

The White House and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have set an ambitious goal for bringing the power of 21st century information technology to the health care sector. Those of us who are committed to patient safety and quality improvement welcome the sense of urgency that this goal represents.  AHRQ is eager to bring about health IT implementation--rapidly and successfully.

We welcome your comments on this Web site and on the ways AHRQ's National Resource Center for Health IT can best help all those involved in the health IT transformation.

Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D.
Director