Recently, the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) announced the appointment of 19 leaders to serve on the Commission on Investment Imperatives for a Healthy Nation, which “is charged with identifying transformative actions necessary to improve the performance of a health system that is unaffordable to many and falls short of the outcomes that should be achieved”—causes close to the heart of CyncHealth’s work.

• Individual and community health goals as the orienting reference points for every decision and action.
• Health financing and accountability that drives individual and community health and well-being.
• Digital and data architecture enabling seamless, continuously improving services and new knowledge.
• Inclusive, equitable systems as a national expectation, consciously reinforced every time, in every place.
• Private investments in health that maximize returns to U.S. health status and economic productivity.

Petersen-Lukenda says, “We’re excited to play a part in enhancing medical interoperability and efficiency for all—something we have a wealth of experience in—as part of NAM’s Commission on Investment Imperatives for a Healthy Nation. In doing so, we can help make patient care more effective, less costly and streamlined. This means better access to information for doctors, fewer errors, and a smoother experience for patients and everyone involved“

About CyncHealth

CyncHealth is the designated health information exchange (HIE) for Nebraska and western Iowa, connecting over 5 million lives and 1,135 facilities and counting. These cross-connections are community-wide, consisting of hospitals, specialty hospitals, rural health clinics, specialty clinics, long-term post-acute care facilities, and other entities that have valuable data for monitoring the health of populations. CyncHealth empowers participating clinicians to provide better care for patients by giving them instant access to comprehensive and longitudinal health histories, including patient encounter-level reports, diagnostic history, allergies, immunizations, and laboratory results from participating facilities.

About the National Academy of Medicine and its Leadership Consortium

The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) works alongside the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) under the 1863 NAS charter authorized by President Lincoln to provide advice to the nation. The NAM Leadership Consortium provides a trusted venue for senior leaders of national public and private health, medicine, and biomedical science organizations to work cooperatively toward their common commitments to effective, innovative care that consistently adds value to patients and society.

At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, the NAM called on members of the Leadership Consortium to undertake a comprehensive, real-time assessment of COVID-19’s impact on and across nine health system sectors: clinicians; patients, families, and communities; care systems; payers; public health; quality, safety, and standards organizations; research; digital health; and health product manufacturers and innovators. The findings were released in the Fall 2022 in the NAM Special Publication, Emerging Stronger from COVID-19: Priorities for Health System Transformation. In addition to myriad sector-specific challenges, the work underscored the deep cross-cutting multi-sector impact of three challenges that impeded performance in every sector: systemic fragmentation, misaligned incentives, and structural inequities—plus a growing measure of distrust. To build on these learnings, the NAM assembled the Commission on Investment Imperatives for a Healthy Nation to identify opportunities and priorities for creating the broad, cross-sector alignment necessary to overcome these core health system fragilities and reverse the alarming consequences.