Q&A: Straight Talk From the New Health IT Czar

If physicians are going to realize savings in their practice and gain the benefit of those savings, there will have to be some change in the way that we pay for care and some change in the way that we recognize excellence in medicine so that physicians, as well as their patients, feel very directly and personally the benefits of making the health care system a better health care system.

OB: The Recovery Act provides for incentives for HIT adoption starting in 2011, but there are many areas where there are still not uniform standards. Can the industry keep up with this aggressive timetable, and what is the government doing to accelerate that process?

Dr. Blumenthal: Frankly, I think we have most of what we need in the way of standards to permit the physicians to get to meaningful use as it is likely to be defined by 2011. I also think that the industry can reconfigure their software in time to make it possible for physicians to meet those standards. I'm not very concerned about that. What I'm mostly concerned about is that—in recognizing those standards and in certifying the software and hardware that we need to certify—we also make certain that we are laying the groundwork for a dramatically improved set of technologies as we go forward. We are looking very hard at how we [can ensure] that when we certify a system and we set a set of standards, we are leaving room for innovation and improvement.

'We should be constantly linking our definition of meaningful use to clinically meaningful capabilities.' DR. BLUMENTHAL