David Blumenthal

See the following -

In Second Look, Few Savings From Digital Health Records

Reed Abelson and Julie Creswell | CNBC | January 11, 2013

The conversion to electronic health records has failed so far to produce the hoped-for savings in health care costs and has had mixed results, at best, in improving efficiency and patient care, according to a new analysis by the influential RAND Corporation. Read More »

In Second Look, Few Savings From Digital Health Records

Reed Abelson and Julie Creswell | New York Times | January 10, 2013

The conversion to electronic health records has failed so far to produce the hoped-for savings in health care costs and has had mixed results, at best, in improving efficiency and patient care, according to a new analysis by the influential RAND Corporation. Read More »

Interoperability: Quick Route To Better Care

Neil Versel | InformationWeek | November 12, 2012

Healthcare quality and efficiency could move forward 20 years in a matter of months if only there were true interoperability of electronic health information, according to a noted critic of the health IT industry. Read More »

Iowa Is Voting on Healthcare Tonight

Health care is no longer about us. Health care is about waste, fraud and abuse. Health care is about “bending the curve”. Health care is about global competitiveness of corporations. Health care is about carving up a $3 trillion opportunity. Health care is about private equity, mezzanine funding, return on investment, valuations and public offerings. Health care is about the economy, and the economy is no longer about us. 

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Lack Of Funding, Clout Didn't Deter Kolodner From Tackling ONC's Top Spot

Joseph Conn | Modern Healthcare | April 10, 2014

Dr. Robert Kolodner had his eyes wide open when he took the top spot at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS.  He knew that his predecessor, Dr. David Brailer, had asked in vain for billions of dollars to help subsidize the cost of EHRS to hospitals and physicians, federal money he thought ONC needed.

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Looking Back At A 2014: Thermidor For Health Care Reform?

Andy Oram | EMR & EHR | December 29, 2014

As money drains out of health care reform, there are indications that the impetus for change is receding as well...

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ONC's structure gets flatter as its $2B stimulus appropriation ends

Joseph Conn | Modern Healthcare | June 3, 2014

It should have come as little surprise that Dr. Karen DeSalvo, in announcing last week a reorganization of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, said she was aiming for a “flatter” reporting structure.

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The Best Way to Share Health Records? An App in Patients’ Hands

Eric Schneider, MD, Aneesh Chopra, and David Blumenthal, MD | The Commonwealth Fund Blog | February 23, 2016

Much has been written recently about information blocking—the inability or unwillingness of hospitals and doctors to share electronic data from our health records with one another. Lack of technical interoperability and regulations protecting security, privacy, and confidentiality are often blamed. But the reality is that technical barriers are falling. The same technology that enables your smartphone to pull sensitive financial data from your bank to pay your taxes or a taxi driver can be applied to your health care records. More importantly, the regulatory path to health records sharing is now open—the rules are already on the books.

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The Fax of Life

Sarah Kliff | Vox | October 30, 2017

When you walk into the Arlington Women’s Center, you see a spacious waiting room with artwork on the wall, maroon chairs, and a friendly receptionist sitting at the front desk. The obstetrics and gynecology practice serves a high-income suburb of Washington, DC. Framed photographs on the wall advertise the center’s physicians who’ve made lists of the city’s best doctors. It’s a modern, upscale doctor office. But when it needs to share patient records, it turns to an outdated technology: the fax machine...

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The HITECH Era – A Patient-Centered Perspective

Robert M. Wachter, Michael Blum, Aaron Neinstein, and Mark Savage | Connecting Health Data | October 10, 2017

We appreciate the recent perspectives published in the New England Journal of Medicine on the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 and the positive impact that it and resulting health IT policies have had on U.S. health care.1,2 The perspectives highlighted the remarkable increase in adoption and use of electronic health records (EHRs) over the past eight years, thanks to the HITECH Act and to ONC’s and CMS’s implementation of it with major advice and help from the multi-stakeholder HIT Policy and Standards committees...

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Top Rated Electronic Health Record Software Is Free

Dan Munro | Forbes.com | July 27, 2014

Earlier this month, Medscape published the results of their recent survey (here) which asked 18,575 physicians across 25 specialties to rate their Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. For overall satisfaction, the #1 ranked EHR solution was the VA’s Computerized Patient Record System ‒ also known as VistA. It was built using open‒source software and is therefore license free.

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Why Doctors Still Use Pen And Paper

James Fallows | The Atlantic | March 19, 2014

The health-care system is one of the most technology-dependent parts of the American economy, and one of the most primitive. Every patient knows, and dreads, the first stage of any doctor visit: sitting down with a clipboard and filling out forms by hand.

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