It's fashionable these days to call every cluster of U.S. Senators a gang.
The Gang of Six. The Gang of Eight.
This week, six Republican senators, having formed their own grouping—let's call it the Gang of Carp—released what they called a “white paper.” In it, they carped about problems with the management and direction of several federal health information technology programs funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. They said we need to “reboot” the program, as if it had crashed. That assessment was unbalanced and unfair.
Also this week, a group of 10 healthcare IT cognoscenti—let's call them the Gang of Good Cheer—put out their own “discussion paper,” finding bliss in healthcare IT. Pangloss would have beamed at their grand vision of “an exponential rate of progress in the use of health and health-related data” as if there weren't serious shortcomings thus far. Their paper, too, was unbalanced; cheerleading bordering on euphoria.
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A pair of new reports from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology deserve your click-throughs.
Two surveys conducted with the help of the American Hospital Association show strong growth in overall electronic health-record adoption and substantial increases in literally dozens of key EHR functions. The reports cover the years 2008 through 2012.
The first report (PDF) focuses on growth in the percentages of EHR acquisition and adoption. It provides a state-by-state comparison of hospital “basic” EHR adoption rates. Some 14 states have achieved rates of 90% or higher, including Vermont and New Hampshire with 100%.
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I've written about plans to scrap the Veterans Affairs Department's VistA electronic health-record system and replace I've written before about plans to scrap the Veterans Affairs Department's VistA electronic health-record system and replace it with a whole new EHR system built from scratch, jointly, with the military, but it bears repeating—that idea, building a whole new EHR system, was worse than nutty.
Taxpayers have invested billions of dollars in VistA. The development effort, started in 1977, produced one of the best EHRs ever, maybe the best.
I was personally introduced to VistA in 2003 by Dr. Louis Coulson, who graciously gave me a demonstration at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago.
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Professionally speaking, I am a connoisseur of a certain kind of crankiness.
I like to listen to people who don't like the deal we've been handed and are willing to grump about it.
Decorum may make the world turn smoothly, but noisy people make it change. Often, they also make my job more fun.
A lot of people in leadership pay lip service to the ideal that they're open to new ideas, but we all know from experience that many are not.
In the magazine this week are short profiles on four of the squeakiest wheels in healthcare information technology—three physicians and a researcher with a doctorate in sociology. They are Dr. Lawrence Weed, Dr. Scot Silverstein, Dr. Deborah Peel, and Ross Koppel, Ph.D.
Each are self-professed fans of health information technology, but each have bones to pick with current systems and practices.
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Privacy, security rule update coming soon—honest.
The Office for Civil Rights at HHS is about to release its omnibus final rule on health information technology privacy and security—this time for sure.
“Stay tuned,” said Leon Rodriguez, director of the Office for Civil Rights, in a recent telephone interview. His office is the chief federal enforcement agency of privacy and security rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and the lead rule writer for HHS of the HIPAA privacy and security rule amendments required under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
“Stay really tuned,” Rodriguez said. “I would really watch closely in the coming weeks.”
But haven't we seen this movie?
Back in March 2012, the civil rights office shipped off its ARRA-mandated privacy and security rule update to the White House for what was then believed to have been only a perfunctory once-over by its Office of Management and Budget before its imminent release.
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