Harvard's Blumenthal Tasked With Upgrading U.S. Health IT
BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, March 24 2009
When President Obama gets started talking about the potential for technological innovation to meaningfully improve the lives of Americans, you can be reasonably sure that the words "electronic health records" are soon to follow. President Bush talked about digitizing the U.S.'s often archaic medical system by 2014, and Obama has enthusiastically seconded the motion. Meanwhile and on the other coast, Silicon Valley is fairly drooling over the market that health IT potentially opens up. Digitized doctor and hospital records could power long-dreamt-of web 2.0 products like Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault and jumpstart a new wave of R&D and innovation in the U.S. tech sector. And that could go a long way towards earning Obama the distinction of being America's true first "Tech President." (Come to think of it, health IT shares many of the same buzz words as that other area Obama can earn tech cred -- opening government data. Words like standard and timely and non-proprietary.) Putting dollars to rhetoric, just under $20 billion was included in the stimulus plan to finish building out the Nationwide Health Information Network. And now Obama has filled the post of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology within the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. David Blumenthal, reports Federal Computer Week's Mary Mosquera, "was a senior health adviser for the Obama presidential campaign. He most recently served as a physician and director of the Institute for Health Policy at The Massachusetts General Hospital/Partners HealthCare System in Boston." Blumenthal, a former Ted Kennedy Senate staffer, hasn't minced words on the woeful state of American health IT, calling it in 2006 "pitifully behind where we should be."