The healthcare alarm has sounded on both ends: cost for all and quality/access for some.

Imagine the worst performing cost-inflation sector of our nation’s economy (healthcare inflation at an alarming 6-to-8 percent), crossed with the disparities of care access and quality among our population groups (about 30 million Americans perpetually uninsured and quality of care varies dramatically).

If the disparities I mention were in any sector other than healthcare—like people forced to drive clunkers rather than new, high-quality cars—our nation would not be at a point of outcry. In virtually every other consumer market, personal choice and ability to afford those choices is simply an acceptable reality of the free market and its advantages that produce personal freedom.

But the reason for today’s public outcry over our state of healthcare is our nation is at risk with several pervasive preventable diseases, we have an emerging quadrupling of senior-aged “baby boomers” during an enduring, stressfully fragile economy.

That’s all the bad news, which actually presents the crisis point at which the old Chinese proverb would call an opportunity.

The good news is that we now have two other factors at bay in this situation of “health care reform.”

The first factor is the opportunity of achieving cost savings by quickly integrating health information technology (HIT) and health information exchange (HIE) with clinical comparative effectiveness AND patient-centered decision making. HIT-HIE must be at the vortex, or center-driven acceleration, that will enable both high quality care and patient choices to prevail.

The second factor at bay for us to recognize is that of an unprecedented collaboration between stakeholders—political leaders, insurers, hospitals and doctors, and companies serving these industries.

President Obama recently hosted a March 5 White House Health Reform Forum attended by national leaders from all of these camps, who all agreed on the record that the health reform landscape is different this year from the 1994 polarized public debates that culminated in the “Harry and Louise” ads. The President even joked that we’ve gone from “Harry and Louise” to a crisis more like “Thelma and Louise”—heading for a cliff.

I believe it is within that collaborative humor that our nation has perhaps the greatest opportunity to create an unprecedented fully transparent health system.

If we use the HIT-HIE business case, I believe our healthcare system can actually be much better than the socialized-health provider countries we’ve been routinely citing as rationing their care, such as Canada and England. It can be better BECAUSE with full transparency of cost, quality and value to consumers and other stakeholders we will promote and preserve more consumer-driven decisions and health-value choices in our country.

We won’t do this precisely because this new group of more moderate policy leaders will design it this way, but because Americans want and will demand choice in the context of open, transparent information about the health changes facing them and the options available in full transparency. Given information and the chance to make decisions, they will take the responsibility for making good choices concerning their own health and that of their families.

Simply by putting health information technology and health information exchange at the center-driving vortex of our reform initiatives we will propel the value component for all citizens of all coverage types.

This concept of value will be, for perhaps the first time in our country’s history, the point when our health consumers take more interest in making decisions in health quality, cost, purchase and value for themselves and individual family members—rather than blindly depending on the old fragmented system of supply-without-demand pricing.

Historically US consumers haven’t made significant personal value decisions in healthcare, being fully dependant on employers and insurers for coverage decisions and on providers to opaquely make their decisions for them in diagnostics, treatment and prevention. All of this occurs millions of times each day without traceable interoperable records that could serve as a basis for future personal decisions and outcomes, and roll up securely in to pooled, confidential information to help millions of others.

A few HIT-HIE data points include the thousands of preventable deaths each year that occur due to handwritten prescriptions, as only 6 percent of all scripts are electronically filed with coding that double-checks accuracy and appropriateness much like spell-check on this computer. National capacity for e-prescribing is at about 20 percent of all care providers, and billions of dollars are projected to be saved in computerization. A related open-market trend is computerized comparison-marketing of brand-to-generic drug alternatives that offer consumers price savings at or near the point of sale.

This personal decision making results in billions of savings annually and is a new model of consumer-demand pricing.

Fragmentation has often been cited as perhaps the main driver of inefficiency in our healthcare systems. In fact, former Health Secretary Michael O. Leavitt poignantly said we don’t even have “a healthcare system” as our care is more of a patchwork of disparate fragmented systems of mismatched distribution, costs and quality.

And here lies the opportunity.

Our country’s leaders are fully engaged not only in spending money but also in saving money via health IT. The president campaigned in his primary to target at least $10 billion to HIT adoption, and the recent spending bills have tripled that amount in spending (in February’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s administrative spending through Medicare and  Medicaid incentives, administrative costs and $12 billion off-set savings).

So, how can we accomplish propelling high-quality care value and cost efficiency into reform?

The reform initiatives on the regulation side call for a health oversight board with powers and responsibilities similar to the SEC’s role over financial markets.

A very relevant national transparency comparison for our immediate health-reform situation is that of the SEC’s early role in pioneering public-market transparency. In the 1960s the least efficient part of the US financial markets was in the opaque trading of smaller, unlisted “penny stock” shares of growth companies.

Investors were complaining in scores (like today’s health consumers) of unfair losses due to lack of basic data information.  The SEC called on the brokerage regulator NASD to create computerized real-time quotations, and ultimately material news disclosure, for thousands of smaller unlisted companies.

The SEC persisted in its vision for full and fair transparency in all financial markets.  The result became the “AQ” automated quotations of the then-future NASDAQ stock market.

More importantly, old-world financial markets have been transformed forever into the information age with full transparency and much tighter trading margins for all market participants due to the central regulator’s persistence. And, in this free-but-regulated market approach, the related industries were able to all grow together and prosper for the economic health of the nation.

In order to get healthcare reform right, we as a nation must intentionally link HIT-HIE to all healthcare reform policies and initiatives.  This will enable the disparate fragmented systems to become more uniform and efficient, delivering a “universal” knowledge of real costs and options, in the context of care quality and delivery outcomes, on an individual basis.

Our nation can only sustain health spending and afford to increase its public, taxpayer-funded investment in quality and access if it returns value and efficiency for all consumers.

This will work successfully for all Americans if our new “universal” healthcare is both universally transparent in all costs, health outcomes, and full accessibility.

If private-sector providers, insurers, investors, and especially consumers all participate in open transparency, great things can happen for the health care and health quality of our nation.  To get this right, we must include full transparency via HIT-HIE in all of the steps of healthcare reform, giving it the chance to become fully universal and of value for all.