Looking to the future
Some in the industry doubt that meaningful use will – in the end – produce the promised results. Blumenthal is not among the doubters, though he does allow that the results could take longer than anticipated to achieve.

“We need to keep perspective on this,” he said. “The question is not whether the world will be perfect, but whether it will be better. And, the world will be better, even with electronic health records that are imperfectly interoperable and where exchange is limited to certain parts of the country or certain sectors of the healthcare economy. They’ll be better because within systems – like Mayo or Kaiser – there’ll be true interoperability, and there will be an enormous improvement in the power of information to modify care. Care will get better, patient outcomes will improve, care will get more efficient. But it won’t be as good as we’d like it to be, or as good as it could be.

He suggested it would be necessary to carefully assess the relative roles of the government and the private sector, ensuring that we get the best out of this market.

“Markets do fail,” he noted. “They’re not perfect. Look at Wall Street. Look at the GM imbroglio right now. We leave private sector entities to do their own things, and they don't always do the things we want, and government steps in, regulates, penalizes, protects consumers – the same dynamic I think will unfold in this market, but it will take a while. It’ll take private and public action to get us where we need to get.”

Turning around a behemoth of a healthcare system is challenging. Is it possible that some of the efforts, especially regarding meaningful use, have been in vain?

“Oh, no,” Blumenthal answered. “I think this is an enormously powerful development. Just look at this discussion of the Apple-Epic alliance. That was unimaginable before HITECH. But now there’s such a critical mass – we’re reaching a critical mass of digitized information, so that it’s possible to think about packaging electronic health record data and funneling it to consumers in ways that could empower them in totally unforeseen ways.

“Just think of the suite of applications that might be developed to take the data that’s available in the Kaiser electronic health record and make it available through a whole series of sophisticated Apple-developed applications to people with chronic illnesses. I mean it’s a whole new field of medicine. That’s got to have huge benefits over the long term. So, getting that information into digital form, which was the key purpose of meaningful use Stage 1 lays the groundwork for, I think, progress that was unimaginable before.

“Just the very fact that Microsoft, Google, IBM – all these powerhouses of technology – now have big healthcare investments and businesses and the number of startups. This was all unimaginable before five years ago.

“So, this is huge progress. It’s just that there’s a lot to-ing and fro-ing; there’s a lot of friction; there are a lot of things that are less perfect than we’d like them to be.

But, in the sweep of history? We’re finally entering the modern information age in healthcare.