News Briefs: Government Updates

This roundup includes the following brief government updates:

HHS recently released a report that summarizes comments from the thousands of community discussions on health care that Americans hosted and participated in at the request of (then) President-elect Obama in December.

The report summarizes comments from the more than 9,000 community gatherings that took place in the waning days of 2008. Discussion hosts and guests submitted group reports summarizing their groups' concerns and suggestions and filled out individual participant surveys. Participants submitted 3,276 group reports and 30,603 participant surveys. These were collected and analyzed and are summarized in the HHS report.

The costs of insurance and of health care services were top concerns among participants, along with a lack of emphasis on disease prevention, limited insurance access because of a pre-existing condition, and the quality of care. Participants called for a system that is fair, patient-centered, choice-oriented, simple, efficient and comprehensive.

The report was issued at the same time HHS launched a new Web site, Health Reform.gov, designed to allow Americans to share their thoughts about health care reform with the Obama administration and to sign a statement of support for enacting comprehensive reform. The Web site also includes individual state reports from the health care community discussions.

President Obama has selected David Blumenthal, M.D., M.P.P., to be the nation's new National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Blumenthal will lead HHS' effort to modernize America's health care system by pressing for widespread implementation of interoperable health information technology, or IT, as called for in the newly enacted American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Blumenthal is a practicing physician who most recently served as director of the Institute for Health Policy at the Massachusetts General Hospital/Partners HealthCare System in Boston.

According to a March 20 press release from HHS, Blumenthal is one of the nation's leading health IT experts and shares the Obama administration's commitment to investing in a health IT infrastructure that will protect patient privacy and improve quality and efficiency throughout the U.S. health care system.

Blumenthal also has personal experience with health IT. "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," he said in the press release.