Blumenthal helps rebut health reform critics

The adoption of health information technology will be a catalyst for the healthcare improvement goals of health reform legislation, said Dr. David Blumenthal, the national health IT coordinator. Blumenthal answered critics of the administration’s health reform efforts and health IT’s role in accomplishing it in an Aug. 7 online presentation sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Health IT can empower all kinds of improvement in preventive care, in acute care and chronic care,” he said during the webinar.

Health IT will also help provide physicians equipped with best practices and research data for treating many conditions to improve patient outcomes, he said. The economic stimulus provides $1.1 billion for comparative effectiveness research through programs at HHS’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Institutes of Health and the Office of the HHS Secretary.

 “I think they are afraid that physicians somehow will be controlled by the information that’s in the record or by guidelines that are in the electronic record,” Blumenthal said.  An electronic record, however, assembles for the physician all of the information that is relevant to be able to make an effective decision.

“It gives them what they need to be correct and wise at the point that the decision has to be made,” Blumenthal said.

“The electronic health record, by bringing all this information together in one place at one time and accessible to the physician, can advance the patient’s health, make the system more efficient and reduce premiums over time as a result,” Blumenthal said.

Health IT helps to do that by preventing duplicative tests and reminding physicians about when their patients’ preventive services are due. “We know that prevention is an important way of avoiding health care costs,” he said.

He is aware that changing from paper to electronic records can be difficult because as a physician he himself had to make such changes.  But he said he found that “almost immediately” it made him a better doctor, with more information at his fingertips to answer his patients’ questions.

“I wasn’t losing any part of the patient’s record, and I could find the information that I needed when they were in my office,” he said.

The administration also launched a Web site http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/
to provide information to the public to rebut claims it considers incorrect about health reform that some groups have disseminated.