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There’s so much going on health IT these days, it’ll make your head spin. Fortunately, it appears a bang-up good job is being done by the health IT team at HHS and the implementers they’re working with.

Example of “head spin” and what’s at stake for consumer/patients: as much as the Society for Participatory Medicine has advocated for data liquidity and “gimme my data,” I only learned yesterday of an astounding statistic that’s been circulating for years:

The typical primary care physician has 229 other physicians working in 117 practices with which care must be coordinated.

And they’ve had to do this with fax machines. Costly manual labor (senseless cost and delays), pieces of paper getting lost and misfiled, confidential data faxed to the wrong number, etc.

Yesterday’s superb webcast about The Direct Project documented how this is already changing: despite skeptics’ protestations that it’ll never happen, projects are already well underway making electronic records transfer a reality in several states among many players. It appears to me that the regulations have been written in a way that successfully shoves things in the right direction, yet puts the apple within reach so people can achieve the goal.

Great work, you guys. More about this later, when they publish the archive of the webcast.

 

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