ORLANDO, Fla. -- Dr. Robert Kolodner, national coordinator of health information technology, said today he hopes to see a 50 percent increase in e-health record use by doctors in their offices this year.
“We really do think this is a banner year coming up,” Kolodner told an audience at the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society conference.
He also predicted that the Nationwide Health Information Network would begin to become operational this year and that vendors of EHR systems would begin incorporating newly adopted federal standards into their products.
The increase in physicians’ use of EHRs will be driven in part by hospitals’ donations of EHR software to doctors who practice at the hospitals, Kolodner said. This is now possible because the Health and Human Services Department has created an exemption from the anti-kickback rules that limit hospital gifts to doctors.
By 2012 and perhaps as soon as late 2009, he said, half of all doctors will use EHRs.
Kolodner noted that all three of the remaining major-party presidential candidates have identified health care as a major issue and have endorsed health IT as a strategy for fixing the system. As a result, he said, whoever is elected is likely to retain his office in some form.
For several reasons, including his own career civil servant status and the existence of a line item for his office in the federal budget, he does not expect dramatic upheaval, but Kolodner said changes at the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT will occur because the office and its tasks have been changing ever since it was created in 2004.
“ONC is different than any other office that I’ve seen or worked in” during a 30-year-plus federal career because of its changeability, Kolodner said. “The things that we have on our plate – they change, they morph.”
What’s more, he said, ONC may not persist for another decade if it succeeds in its mission. “Five or 10 years from now, maybe there will be a role [for ONC]. Maybe not,” he said.
The government has been plowing the health IT ground and planting, he said, and “now we’re starting to see the sprouts come up through the ground.”
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
