Dr. David Blumenthal: National Health Care Information Technology Coordinator

March 21, 2009 by Michael Ricciardelli · 1 Comment
Filed under: EMR, Electronic Medical Records, HHS, IT

photo by clintJCL via Flickr

President Obama has appointed Dr. David Blumenthal as the National Health Care Information Technology Coordinator. Dr. Blumenthal is a former Harvard Medical School Professor who, as reported by Kaiser.org, “has conducted a number of studies related to health care IT” and has “served as director of the Institute for Health Policy at the Massachusetts General Hospital/Partners HealthCare System and as a senior adviser to President Obama during his campaign.”

As National Health Care IT Coordinator, Dr. Blumenthal can be expected to play a large role in the direction of how the 19 billion dollars apportioned for Health IT in the recently enacted stimulus package will be spent.

Dana Blankenhorn over at ZDNet Healthcare has written a short and interesting post on Dr. Blumenthal. Among other things worth noting in the post, Blankenthorn writes that Blumenthal has been quoted as “saying IT grants should go to inner-city and rural hospitals, as well as small practices, while most health IT money should go to incentives for improving the quality of care.”

As for the choice of Dr. Blumenthal, Blankenhorn writes

The good news is he’s a policy expert and not a vendor. The bad news is he’s a policy expert and not a technologist. He is a renowned health IT advocate who knows his way around bureaucracies but he is not a geek.

This means Blumenthal has not expressed a view on open source vs. proprietary software. He also hasn’t gotten his hands dirty in the health IT trenches.

Having said that, one might hope that Dr. Blumenthal is familiar with the work of Professors Sharona Hoffman & Andy Podgurski.

Tags: Andy Podgurski, Dana Blankenhorn, David Blumenthal, Dr. David Blumenthal, EMR, Harvard Medical School, Health IT, Health Reform, National Health Care Information Technology Coordinator, Sharona Hoffman, Think Tanks, ZDNET Healthcare

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One Response to “Dr. David Blumenthal: National Health Care Information Technology Coordinator”

Global Healthcare Information Technology Market says:

08/28/2009 at 1:15 am

Well we can hope that everything goes well, we can hope for something new and innovative to take place.

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