David Blumenthal

See the following -

Can Data Provide the Trust we Need in Health Care?

One of the problems dragging down the US health care system is that nobody trusts one another. Most of us, as individuals, place faith in our personal health care providers, which may or may not be warranted. But on a larger scale we’re all suspicious of each other... Read More »

Case For Dropping MU Stages 2 And 3

Dale Sanders | Healthcare IT News | April 28, 2014

Federal meaningful use requirements are well intentioned, but like a teacher who “teaches to the test,” the federal meaningful use program created a very complicated system that might pass the test of meaningful use stages, but is not producing meaningful results for patients and clinicians...

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Digital Records May Not Cut Health Costs, Study Cautions

Steve Lohr | New York Times | March 5, 2012

Computerized patient records are unlikely to cut health care costs and may actually encourage doctors to order expensive tests more often, a study published on Monday concludes. Read More »

Ebola, Electronic Medical Records, and Epic Systems

Michelle Malkin | Michellemalkin.com | October 7, 2014

A Dallas hospital’s bizarre bungle of the first U.S. case of Ebola leaves me wondering: Is someone covering up for a crony billionaire Obama donor and her controversy-plagued, taxpayer-subsidized electronic medical records company? Last week, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital revealed in a statement that a procedural flaw in its online health records system led to potentially deadly miscommunication between nurses and doctors. The facility sent Ebola victim Thomas Duncan home despite showing signs of the disease—only to admit him with worse symptoms three days later.

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Editor's Letter: 10 Years And 6 Czars Into HIT, Where Are We Now?

Diana Manos | Government Health IT | December 23, 2013

It has been almost a decade since President George W. Bush launched the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and since that time hordes of pilots, projects, grants, initiatives, federal advisory committees and regulations have been launched or established. Read More »

EHR Business Environment Must Change To Achieve Interoperability

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | February 4, 2015

The main challenges for the nation’s health IT interoperability are not technical but business related...

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EHR Business Environment Must Change to Achieve Interoperability

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | February 4, 2015

The main challenges for the nation’s health IT interoperability are not technical but business related. That’s the word from former National Coordinators for Health IT speaking in a panel session on Tuesday at ONC’s Annual Meeting in Washington. Farzad Mostashari, M.D., former National Coordinator for HIT and currently CEO of start-up Aledade which partners with independent primary care physicians, warned that business practices among some electronic health records vendors are inhibiting the sharing of health information by restricting information exchange with users of other EHR products.

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EHR Vendors Focusing On Usability

Mary Mosquera | Government Health IT | February 12, 2013

Electronic health records (EHRs) have to be usable and useful by physicians and integrate with hospitals’ or practices’ other systems to benefit providers or else the money spent on them is just wasted. Read More »

Experts Suggest NHS And US Health Care Systems Learn From Each Other

Staff Writer | TheInformationDaily.com | October 12, 2012

Medical experts from the USA and the UK have suggested in their Health Policy paper that the health care systems of both countries should share ideas. Read More »

Feds Move Into Digital Medicine, Face Doctor Backlash

Laura Ungar and Jayne O'Donnell | USA TODAY | February 1, 2015

"Physicians passionately despise their electronic health records," says Lexington, Ky., emergency physician Steven Stack, the American Medical Association's president-elect. "We use technology quickly when it works … Electronic health records don't work right now."

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Former healthcare CEO equates Epic customers, hostages

Kyle Murphy | EHR Intelligence | October 18, 2012

Former CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess, Paul Levy has noticed some disturbing similarities between the characteristics of Stockholm syndrome and the attitudes of customers of the Epic Systems toward to the electronic health record (EHR) vendor. Read More »

Former ONC Leaders Cite Challenges in Maximizing EHR Benefits

Joseph Goedert | Health Data Management | September 12, 2017

Four former national coordinators for health information technology have penned a perspective on achievements made in using electronic health records under the HITECH Act and where providers and the HIT industry still must go to continue past progress. The law spurred rapid progress toward digitizing the industry, which now is at an inflection point, say the authors, who include Vindell Washington, MD, Karen DeSalvo, MD, Farzad Mostashari, MD, and David Blumenthal, MD. EHRs have primed the industry to now achieve several positive results, including improving clinical guidelines, and sharing patient data seamlessly and securely...

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Guess What: Docs Don't Like EHRs

It's kind of "dog-bites-man" type news, but there is even more evidence that physicians not only don't think EHRs are helping them but actually see them as contributing to burnout. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic found that use of EHRs (or computerized physician order entries -- CPOEs) was associated with lower satisfaction with time spent on clerical tasks, with nearly half of physicians saying the amount of time spent on clerical tasks was unreasonable.  No wonder the AMA CEO recently complained that physicians were turning into the "most expensive data entry force on the face of the planet."

Hazards Tied to Medical Records Rush

Christopher Rowland | Boston Globe | July 20, 2014

Subsidies given for computerizing, but no reporting required when errors cause harm

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Health Care’s Road To Ruin

Elisabeth Rosenthal | New York Times | December 21, 2013

HAVING spent the last year reporting for a series of articles on the high cost of American medicine, I’ve heard it all. [...] As of Jan. 1, the Affordable Care Act promises for the first time to deliver the possibility of meaningful health insurance to every American. But where does that leave the United States in terms of affordable care? Read More »