Dr. David Blumenthal’s Testimony Regarding HIT
Last month, Dr. David Blumenthal, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, testified (38 KB, .pdf) before the House Small Business Subcommittee regarding “…the Administration’s health information technology (HIT) activities and specifically how they impact small health care practices” (p. 2)
In his statement, he made the following comment:
“Providers in small health care practices that seek to adopt and meaningfully use HIT face a complex variety of tasks. Those tasks include assessing needs, selecting and negotiating with a system vendor or reseller, and implementing workflow changes to improve clinical performance and, ultimately, outcomes. Past experiences have shown that without robust technical assistance, many EHRs that are purchased are never installed or the providers never obtain meaningful use of the systems.” (p. 5)
First, Dr. Blumenthal rightly acknowledges some of the potential challenges for appropriately implementing HIT. Second, he identifies a rudimentary process for doing so – something discussed in the article “Assessing Devices from the User’s Perspective” (4 MB, .pdf) and in this post. Finally, this is another example where human factors and ergonomics professionals can assist the health care community by lending their expertise on designing, assessing, and implementing people-centered systems.
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I personally am afraid that the whole effort will fail after much time and billions of dollars are spent. The government is not off to a good start as far as I can tell. Instead of mandating the use of the “open source” system currently used very successful by the VA health care system and beginning to immediately implement it, they have apparently decided to start at the very beginning of the application system development life cycle by developing “standards” that all hospital systems and probably private doctors practices systems must meet. I can only hope that the system used by the VA (also used by the American Indian health care system) comes close to meeting those standards already and therefore will require the least amount of customization to meet them. It’s more likely, however, that this system will be excluded from consideration because it is “open source”. And the government will eventually mandate massive changes to proprietary health care systems. What a shame.