Is the National eHealth Collaborative still necessary?

I’ve been wondering the last few days if the National eHealth Collaborative still serves a useful purpose. This group, you may remember, is the private-sector outgrowth of the American Health Information Community, the public-private board set up by the Bush administration to advise the Department of Health and Human Services on various health IT issues.

The plan all along was to spin AHIC off into the private sector, and that happened in 2008. With the advent of the Obama administration, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 set up the Health IT Policy Committee and the Health IT Standards Committee as official advisory panels, consisting of leaders from both government and the private sector. And in the private sector, numerous groups, notably the eHealth Initiative, had been well established before NeHC came along.

Do we really need a group like NeHC? For that matter, the eHealth Initiative seems less relevant than it was, say 3-4 years ago.