Health IT: Private and Public Push Needed

A telling quote in today’s Washington Post article about Microsoft Corp.’s new online electronic-medical-record service, HealthVault, encapsulates why the federal government needs to join the private sector’s push for personal and secure online Electronic Medical Records. EMRs “would be ‘great for patients, but there’s absolutely no business case for doing it in primary care,’ said Richard J. Baron, an internist in Philadelphia whose practice uses an electronic record system similar to HealthVault.” Microsoft beat its competitors, including Google, to the punch, as a number of information technology companies and health insurers are trying, with mixed success, to lure doctors away from their paper- and office-based health recordkeeping and into the IT age. That’s why a concerted push by the federal government is necessary to establish health IT interoperability standards and privacy protections for personal electronic medical records, provide health IT funding for safety-net providers, and make new investments in data capacity and comparative effectiveness research.

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