[medinformatics] Brailer Urges Private Sector to Push EMR

[Healthcare Informatics News]

While government will provide incentives and muscle, the private sector must ultimately make
functional health information technology a widespread reality, national health IT coordinator David Brailer told a
crowd of attendees at a health care IT conference Thursday. From
eWeek:


Health IT, particularly for EHRs (electronic health records), promises to make health care more effective and
efficient by tracking the medical care a patient receives from different providers and by supplying doctors and nurses
with relevant information, such as drug counterindications or preventive care recommendations, while they care for a
patient.

Nonetheless, physicians, particularly ones in small outpatient settings, have not embraced health IT. “My goal is
not to get EHRs in the doctors’ offices; it is to create a marketplace for those EHRs,” Brailer said later in an
interview with eWEEK.com. He said the government faces significant constraints, with the deficit as a “black hole
sucking everything into it.” But he said the government won’t regulate EHRs into existence or use brute force.

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