Just as thousands of healthcare IT professionals - techies, policy wonks and luminaries, an actor and an astronaut - sail into The Windy City for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's annual conference this month, there's a new wind at their back.
It doesn't exactly promise smooth sailing, but it sure is exciting.
President Bush brought the concept of healthcare IT to the mainstream in 2004 when he called for electronic medical records for all Americans. Then Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt launched several government pilot programs to move the call from concept to reality. Now, President Barack Obama has taken on healthcare IT as a cause, one that is central to the reform that the healthcare system so sorely needs, he says.
Congress has allocated a $19.5 billion piece of the economic stimulus package for it, and just a couple of weeks ago, the Obama team named a new national chief to help push healthcare IT to places never before ventured.
David Blumenthal, MD, a practicing primary care physician and Harvard Medical chool professor will be in charge of disbursing some of the money - at least the $2 billion under his purview - and presumably, following it.
He succeeds Robert Kolodner, MD, who took on the role of the national coordinator for healthcare information technology on loan from the Veterans Administration. Kolodner is credited for driving the move toward healthcare automation at the VA - long before most others realized it was the way to go. He reportedly is headed back to the VA in a role not yet announced. We need bright people with vision like Kolodner at all levels of healthcare.
But with a new administration in place, Blumenthal is the right choice at the right time. He is well known in healthcare circles as a man of vision and innovation, one who is steady at the helm, confident he can ride a few high winds if they were to occur.
Blumenthal, who teaches medicine and healthcare policy and serves as director of Massachusetts General Hospital's Institute for Health Policy, has been a long-time advocate of automation in healthcare.
"We are pitifully behind where we should be," he told the Harvard University Gazette in 2006. "We must find ways to get more physicians to embrace this technology if we are to make major strides in improving healthcare quality."
Indeed. The country, it seems, is under way. It's up to healthcare IT leaders inside and outside the government - and there are many - to chart the right course and come about. The American people are counting on it.
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