National Health IT Week

September 12, 2011 -- Today is the first day of the Sixth Annual National Health IT Week, 9/12-16/2011.

Information technology is essential to healthcare, a fact our technology-worshipping country has been paradoxically slow to recognize. To see why, as always, follow the money.

Our for-profit insurance company middlemen have a sole incentive: their bottom line. The long-term benefits of effective IT systems -- things like quality, continuity of care, population-wide and longitudinal data collection and analysis -- generate no profits. Hence, they aren't reimbursed. Hence, we don't have them.

Most US hospitals still lack comprehensive electronic medical record-keeping. Those that do have them cannot -- indeed prefer not to -- share their data. Well-intentioned (mostly governmentally-funded) efforts at Regional Health Information Organizations have gained little traction and in some cases shut down. So the primary objective of this Health IT Week is "...to educate industry and policy stakeholders on the value of health IT for the US healthcare system."

It's astonishing and disheartening that we still have such a long way to go.

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