Blumenthal to lead U.S. health IT expansion
Executive Summary
HHS names David Blumenthal, most recently director of the Institute for Health Policy at the Massachusetts General Hospital/Partners Health Care System in Boston, as the national coordinator for health information technology. In this role, Blumenthal is tasked with implementing a nationwide health IT infrastructure, a daunting task based on results of small-scale rollouts (1"The Pink Sheet," March 2, 2009, p. 36). Blumenthal was a senior health advisor to President Obama during the campaign; he also has ties to Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., as a staffer on the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research in the 1970s. Blumenthal appeared on a preliminary list of candidates for FDA commissioner, but it was expected that he would land somewhere else within the administration (2"The Pink Sheet," Nov. 3, 2008, p. 25)
You may also be interested in...
Health IT Not “Low-Hanging Fruit” In Health Reform, Some Experts Say
Despite President Barack Obama and others calling health information technology "low-hanging fruit" in the context of comprehensive health care reform, some IT experts and even some in government see it as a more complex problem to solve
Adoption Of E-Health Records Gets Stimulus Of Medicare Rewards, Penalties
A program to bring about wider adoption of health information technology in physicians' offices is mirroring the conceptual framework of rewarding and penalizing physicians through Medicare payments that was used to promote adoption of electronic prescribing
US Q1 Consumer Health Earnings Preview: Label This One Historic And Challenging But Promising
US OTC drug and supplement firms’ reports of results for the first three months of 2024 began on April 19 with P&G. JP Morgan analysts say while “some retailers in the US in particular” are reducing consumer health inventories, for the overall sector they expect “a healthier balance of positive volume and lower pricing contribution.”