Obama's health IT leader says doctors will embrace change

Irene Wielawski writes for Kaiser Health News that electronic medical records may be as important as stethoscopes. "Dr. David Blumenthal was not happy to find a new computer installed on his desk when he showed up for work one morning eight years ago at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He knew the hospital had been hard at work on developing an electronic medical record (EMR) system, but Blumenthal wasn't keen on changing practices that had served him and his patients just fine over the years. Quickly, though, he found himself to be odd man out at staff meetings where younger colleagues eagerly exchanged tips on how to retrieve patient histories, test results and consults with other physicians" (Wielawski, 5/24). Read the entire artricle.

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.