The Influencers: David Blumenthal, M.D.

The Influencers is a continuing series of profiles of the people who help shape healthcare information security and privacy policies.

David Blumenthal, M.D.
National Coordinator for Health Information Technology
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Why He's an Influencer

Blumenthal coordinates nationwide efforts on behalf of HHS to implement the most advanced health information technology and the electronic exchange of health information. His office makes recommendations to HHS on standards and policies for healthcare data security and privacy. His office is creating the rules and regulations to carry out the Medicare and Medicaid incentive program for electronic health records under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

His Experience

Before assuming his current role in April 2009, Blumenthal was director of the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital/Partners HealthCare System in Boston. A practicing physician, he also served as the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Medicine and Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He also served as director of the Harvard University Interfaculty Program for Health Systems Improvement. Previously, he was senior vice president at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital and served as executive director of the Center for Health Policy and Management and as a lecturer on public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. During the late 1970s, Blumenthal worked on Senator Edward Kennedy's Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research. More recently, Blumenthal served as a senior health adviser to the Obama presidential campaign.

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In His Own Words

Blumenthal provides frequent updates in his "Health IT Buzz" blog. (http://healthit.hhs.gov/blog/onc/)

Here is a recent exerpt:
Many health care organizations, big and small, public and private, have installed electronic health record systems and are reaping their benefits daily. Examples include not only national systems like the Veterans Administration and Kaiser Permanente, but regional groups like Geisinger Health System, and individual hospitals like the Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, and Lakeland Hospital, a 77-bed facility outside of Omaha, Nebraska. These organizations show that the vision is feasible - health care can be made higher in quality and lower in cost through the best existing HIT.

From a common sense perspective, it is impossible to imagine a 21st century American health system deprived of the electronic methods of collecting, managing, and moving data that have revolutionized virtually every other area of human endeavor. Information is the lifeblood of medicine. HIT is its circulatory system. A health care system without an electronic health information system simply cannot achieve its potential, anymore than an Olympic athlete could compete with a failing heart. This is the vision that President Obama and the Congress embraced in February 2009.

Nevertheless, any bold new goal has to be reduced to practice, and skeptics are now asking appropriately whether the HIT program can succeed. A few recent studies have raised questions about whether health care organizations that have installed electronic health records are actually realizing the expected benefits. Perhaps existing examples of success are atypical, and can't be reproduced in the rest of our health system? Perhaps we are moving too fast? Perhaps the risks are too great?