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David Blumenthal’s take on the task of implementing electronic health records nationwide. How did you come to the role of National Coordinator. Did you have a technical background? David Blumenthal. I was not an expert on technology and never have been. I wasn’t the kind of person who in high school learned to program and came in on weekends to get all those cardboard cards and run them through the computers. That was never my thing; I was much more a liberal arts person. But I’ve learned a lot from practicing over the years and many of my research interests were fed by my experience. I began using an electronic system and I came to believe that it would have an important influence on care. Your office has been charged with the goal of catalyzing the adoption of interoperable health information technology by 2014. What will you need to do in order to achieve this? DB. We need to develop a series of regulatory and programmatic foundations in order to achieve this goal. The regulations will govern how we spend the money that the Congress has made available to reward meaningful use of electronic health records. We are in the process of writing the regulations, which is a very carefully scripted process, governed by law and precedent. And we are on the cusp of completing the first set of regulations that will create the rules that will govern the use of the incentives and the rewards that will be available to doctors and hospitals. We’ll also govern the evaluation of the records themselves to make them capable of supporting meaningful use. What role will the Regional Extension Centers play? DB. There are 60 Regional Extension Centers around the country. They are going to be available to doctors and smaller hospitals that need help getting up and going with electronic health records so that they can be meaningful users. We are working with the leaders of these new centers, to get them ready to help people in the field. We are creating multidisciplinary teams around the country, each of which is taking responsibility for up to 1500 physicians and a set of smaller rural hospitals. They will be focused on small practices and hospitals, developing whatever resources are needed to make those physicians and hospitals successful in adopting and using electronic health records.
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Do you expect there to be resistance from prospective users? DB. I do understand that some doctors out there may decide that it’s too much trouble. We’ll try to help them the best we can, but there will be I think an age-related trend toward more rapid adoption among younger physicians. Coming from a slightly older generation myself, I’m obviously very comfortable using EHR. However, the transition between old and young is inevitable. But we don’t want to wait for this new generation to take over; we want to make the existing practitioners part of the 21st century as well. David Blumential is National Coordinator for Health information Technology, DHHS
10/11/2010 16:35