As I’ve noted recently, this Thursday I’m on a stakeholder panel at a meeting of the Adoption/Certification Workgroup, which is part of the Federal Health IT Policy Committee.
As noted in my previous post, this is a busy day, and each of us gets only 5-7 minutes to speak, followed by Q&A. We submit our testimony in advance. Below is mine. Additional reference material:
- Panelist questions here
- Rob Koppel’s March 2009 JAMA article here
- RealPlayer webcast recording Koppel’s December lecture about the article here
- I was alarmed by what I learned in that webcast, and wrote about it here
Click for a PDF of the testimony I submitted.
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This is an excellent speech! You raise all the pertinent points – I really like the bit about keeping the focus away from blame. This points out a philosophical problem that we have in this country which is that intervention is the only way to solve health problems and that every intervention will work perfectly for every patient (preventative care anyone?). One of the reasons that we have such problems with medical tort in this country is that people expect doctors to be infallible. Speak to anyone who’s had a serious condition and had multiple consults from different doctors and they’ll tell you that medicine is more of an art than a science. We can’t expect perfection from doctors – even the more simple procedures can go wrong and it’s not always the doctor’s fault…
Also bravo for pointing out that HIPAA is outdated! If it were up to me that whole law would be scrapped and rewritten from the ground up to focus on auditing not barriers. For example your mention of making health information browser-available is something which is very dangerous for health providers under the current HIPAA law… Since the HITECH act, any breach of patient health information is now the liability of the employee that caused the breach, not the the institution. There are substantial monetary fines as well. I as a programmer of EHR systems don’t want to find myself in a position of becoming a criminal because a patient shared his or her login information with someone else, or forgot to log out of a hospital kiosk…