The Savvy Tech Strategy Behind Obamacare 146
snydeq writes "The U.S. health care industry is undergoing several massive transformations, not the least of which is the shift to interoperable EHR (electronic health records) systems. The ONC's Doug Fridsma discusses the various issues that many health care IT and medical providers have raised regarding use of these systems, which are mandated for 2014 under the HITECH Act of 2004, and are all the more important in light of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Key to the transition, says Fridsma, is transforming health IT for EHRs into something more akin to the Internet, and less like traditional ERP and IT systems. 'I think what we're trying to do is the equivalent of what you've got in the Internet, which is horizontal integration rather than vertical integration,' Fridsma says. 'We've done a lot of work looking at what other countries have done, and we've tried to learn from those experiences. Rather than trying to build this top down and create restrictions, we're really trying to ask, "What's the path of least regret in what we need to do?"'"
This article is built on a bad premise. (Score:3, Informative)
There is nothing necessary about what they're mandating.
Thanks to the way Washington, D.C., works, the end result will be smug bureaucrats patting each other on the back, and doctors wondering if they should just find a different field to work in.
Re:Too bad someone didn't figure this all out (Score:5, Informative)
It's already well underway: http://openehealth.org/ [openehealth.org]
Remind us how many Republicans voted for it (Score:2, Informative)
It's kind of hard to blame any of it on the Republicans since they were not at all involved in the meetings and didn't vote for it.