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That’s a direct quote from Paul Tang, of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, at last week’s meeting of the Health IT Policy committee, of which he is vice chair.

Dr. Tang was riffing on an e-Patient Dave quote, which I read during my testimony:

I want innovation at a rate that resembles the rate of improvement in cell phones and iPods: I want to think, in 2011, that the healthcare tool I started using in 2009 is, well, “that’s SO 2009,” just the way many people think about their cell phones.

It’s a good meme, made better by Latanya Sweeney‘s testimony at the end of the day which asked the committee to start digging in to infrastructure design, not just abstract policy discussions. Here are some quotes I captured:

“The Advance HIT Project (advancehit.org) launches Monday: our goal is to ensure tech decisions are well-informed. My goal was to leave you with hope. Barring that, some architectural designs.”

“I wish that there had been a meeting that included 5 ways to design the national infrastructure, then we asked panelists how their privacy concerns mapped onto those 5 designs.”

Keep following the work of this committee. Their debates go to the heart of participatory medicine: whose data is it? What policies will be in place to allow data liquidity yet protect patient privacy? And to quote Diana Forsythe (yes, again!):

Whose assumptions and whose point of view are inscribed in the design of this tool?

 

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