Healthcare Town Hall

By jeremy.engdahl-johnson

Tech guru David Pogue recently interviewed national health IT director Dr. David Blumenthal. It’s an interesting read (or you can watch Pogue’s CBS program here).

Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Pogue: What about the interoperability problem? Every software company selling these systems puts the data in a different format.

Blumenthal: We’re doing a lot in this office to try to minimize that problem. We’re gonna be helping states to create interoperability capability, capabilities to link records, to link institutions.

And we’re developing standards at the national level to make it possible for records to talk to each other. And then we’re also gonna be certifying records, to give physicians and hospitals some guidance about the capabilities of those records, so that they’ll know in advance whether or not the records are gonna be able to talk to each other.

These [standards discussions] are open processes. This will all be a very open and transparent process.

The interoperability problem is, of course, a big one—as explained here.

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Electronic Health Records, Portablity David Pogue, EHR, Paul Leonardo, Rich Moyer