It took the disaster of Hurricane Katrina to get Louisiana’s doctors to open their minds to new medical technologies, and if health IT is going to win support nationwide, it’ll have to “get real for people,” the Obama administration’s top health IT official argued today.
“It has to become tangible and real for the person, the family member, the doctor, the nurse,” said Karen DeSalvo, the national coordinator for health information technology, who was the New Orleans health commissioner when Katrina hit in 2005. But you also have “to demonstrate benefit,” she added.
DeSalvo, speaking at a POLITICO breakfast panel, said that without a national embrace of new technologies like electronic medical records, the nation misses the chance to vastly improve care and prevent disasters like a hurricane from disrupting care.
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“I believe that we have to be at a tipping point even if we don’t want to be,” she said.
Robert Jarrin, senior director of government affairs for Qualcomm, noted that there isn’t much clamoring among doctors to rush toward new medical technologies in part because “they don’t understand them.” But it’s also because government policies and reimbursements “are not that hospitable to deploying these things.”
