David Blumenthal and HIT (Health Information Technology)

The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog provides some insight into David Blumenthal, President Obama s choice to be in charge of health information technology.  Sarah Rubenstein writes,

The Obama administration has tapped Harvard’s David Blumenthal to be its guru in charge of rolling out its big expansion of health IT.

As national coordinator of health information technology, Blumenthal will have at his disposal the $19.5 billion dedicated to health IT in the recent economic-stimulus package. He has headed the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital/Partners HealthCare System in Boston.

We took a look at a New England Journal of Medicine article he penned in 2007 with Jonathan Glaser, CIO at Partners HealthCare, called “Information Technology Comes to Medicine.”

The idea of health IT transports some enthusiasts “to almost a dreamlike world of health care perfection in which the work of doctors and the care of patients proceed with barely imaginable quality and efficiency,” they wrote. But for many doctors, especially those in solo or small practices, it “conjures a very different image — that of a waiting room full to bursting, a crashed computer, and a frantic clinician on hold with IT support in Bangalore.” . . .