Obama Names New National Health IT Coordinator
Blumenthal will replace Dr. Robert M. Kolodner in what is seen as a key post in the Department of Health and Human Services, given the president's ambitious health-care agenda and the more than $19 billion in health-care IT funds allotted in the federal stimulus package. About $2 billion of those funds are allotted specifically for HHS.
"President Obama believes we must take serious steps to modernize our health care system in order to improve the health of all Americans, bring down costs and ensure sustained long-term economic growth. Health information technology is a critical part of the president's strategy to reform our health care system, and as one of the nation's leading health information technology experts, Dr. Blumenthal has the experience and the vision to help make this effort a reality," said HHS spokeswoman Jenny Backus in an HHS press release Friday.
Blumenthal comes to Capitol Hill from Massachusetts, where he was most recently a physician and director of the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital/Partners Healthcare System in Boston. He is also a former Samuel O. Thier Professor of Medicine and Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, and before that a senior vice president at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and executive director of the Center for Health Policy and Management at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Blumenthal was also a senior health adviser on the Obama campaign, and decades ago worked on Sen. Edward Kennedy's Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, according to his HHS biography.
"I am humbled and honored to have the opportunity to serve President Obama and the American people in the effort to harness the power of health information technology to modernize our health-care system," said Blumenthal in the HHS statement. "As a primary care physician who has used an electronic record to care for patients every day for 10 years, I understand the enormous potential of this technology. President Obama has laid out a vision of health reform that is both inspiring and long overdue. We cannot make that vision a reality without the help of our most advanced computer technology."
Reaction from health-care IT associations around the country was overwhelmingly positive.
"Dr. Blumenthal's expert understanding of the Obama administration's health-care policy initiatives will be an asset to the health-care IT community as well as tackle the requirements and milestones identified in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and work through health-care reform efforts," said H. Stephen Lieber, president and CEO of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), in a statement. "We look forward to working with Dr. Blumenthal and his team at the Office of the National Coordinator."
"There is not a more appropriate selection than Dr. David Blumenthal as National Coordinator to lead America's Health Information Technology efforts through this period of expansion and great promise," added Linda L. Kloss, CEO of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), in a statement. "Dr. Blumenthal brings to our challenge a unique depth of experience, an extremely broad field of vision and, perhaps most important, an unquestionable professional commitment to patient care and welfare -- the ultimate measurement of successful reform."
Kolodner, who will assist Blumenthal in the transition and is expected to continue on with the ONC in some form, suggested to an audience at Everything Channel's Healthcare Summit in November that 2008 would be remembered as a "tipping point year" for health care IT. Everything Channel is the parent company of Channelweb.com.