Blumenthal touts health IT at HHS health reform Webcast

Diana Manos, Senior Editor

As part of a federal effort to dispel myths about health reform, David Blumenthal, the nation’s coordinator for health information technology, said HIT can reduce medical errors and improve the quality of healthcare.

At a Friday Webcast hosted by the Department of Health and Human Services, Blumenthal was part of a panel of federal experts gathered to promote the Obama administration’s proposal for health reform. The panel members took questions from the public via email, Twitter and Facebook.

Blumenthal said healthcare technology sounds “abstract and forbidding,” but it contributes many valuable and fundamental elements of better care. As a primary care physician of 30 years, he said he began using healthcare IT 10 years ago and found it helped him to provide better care and lower costs by preventing duplicate tests for his patients.

Health IT can also remind doctors of important preventative tests that their patients need, helping to improve care, he said.

Blumenthal disputed a Webcast viewer’s question about whether health IT could be used to ration care, saying health IT helps the doctor and patient determine the best course of treatment by providing “everything they need to make a correct and wise decision.”

Blumenthal - who said he was initially hesitant to adopt IT - said The Obama administration has made a commitment toward health IT in the stimulus package, and “I am quite confident we are going to make this transition. This is going to happen because it’s the right thing to do.”

Also on Friday, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius released a series of reports on how health reform will impact each state. This report comes as Congress takes a summer recess with Senate Finance Committee members unable to find a compromise on their version of the bill. The Finance Committee is the last remaining Congressional committee out of five that must pass legislation before a bill can move to the full House and Senate floor for a vote.

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