A federal advisory panel on Tuesday issued a 14-point report of recommendations for what's needed to develop, implement, and foster the secure nationwide exchange of electronic medical information.

The report was issued by the Commission on System Interoperability, which was created by Congress as part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. The commission was charged with developing recommendations, priorities, and a timeline for implementing an electronic health information exchange network.

The commission's other recommendations were categorized into three main themes -- adoption, interoperability, and connectivity.

The commission recommends that the federal government should develop a nationwide "patient authentication standard" that protects individuals' information, as well as lead efforts to offer financial incentives to health-care providers in order to foster the electronic exchange of health information nationally.

The report recommends that within the next two years the federal government, insurers, and employers offer financial incentives, such as pay-for-performance rewards, to health-care providers that use health IT, such as electronic medical record software.

Government researchers estimate that health IT, like physician order-entry and standards-based electronic medical record systems, can help reduce tens of thousands of medical mistakes and billions of dollars in health-care costs annually in the U.S. There are already a handful of incentive programs underway by some private insurers, as well as a Medicare pilot program, that reward health-care providers who improve their quality-of-patient care using health IT.

Among the commission's other recommendations were regulatory reforms that remove obstacles in the adoption of clinical IT by health-care providers. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last month began moving on that front, by recommending changes in regulations, such as so-called anti-kick-back rules that currently prohibit doctors from accepting free health-IT software and hardware from hospitals that are deploying those systems.

The commission also recommends that the Department of Health and Human Services also support a single private-public entity to certify that health-IT products meet interoperability standards, so that health-care providers have confidence that their health-IT investments can exchange data with other systems. HHS is already moving on that front as well.

The commission's 11 members, which were appointed by President Bush and Congress, are leaders in medicine, insurance, technology, and government, and include one CIO, Dr. C. Martin Harris of Cleveland Clinic Foundation.

Other members include commission chairman Scott Wallace, who is president and CEO of The National Alliance for Health Information Technology; Dr. Simon Cohn, associate executive director of health information policy at Kaiser Permanente; Dr. Don E. Detmer, president and CEO of American Medical Informatics Association; Vicky Gregg, R.N., president and CEO of BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee; Gary Mecklenburg, president and CEO of Northwestern Memorial Healthcare; Dr. Herbert Pardes, president and CEO New York Presbyterian Hospital; Thomas M. Priselac, president and CEO Cedars-Sinai Health System.

Other members include Ivan Seidenberg, chairman & CEO Verizon Communication; Fredrick W. Slunecka, regional president of Avera McKennan; and Dr. William W. Stead, director of the informatics center and professor of medicine and biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The designated federal officials on the commission are Dr. Donald A.B. Lindberg and Dana Haza, directors at the National Library of Medicine.