Monday, November 9, 2009

Speech by Dr. Robert Kolodner

The recent National Coordinator for Health Information Technology gave an interesting talk at Georgia Tech last Wednesday, 11/4/09. You can watch all 80 minutes here. Thanks to GA Tech and Emory and their Health Systems Institute for sponsoring the discussion.

A lot of the talk was about health as opposed to health care. We tend to forget the accomplishments of public health in the last decade.

Dr. Kolodner spent several years at the VA before his time with the feds. As such, he understands what a good EMR can do for data collection and analysis. Late in the talk, he showed a graph of hypertensives and how well controlled their blood pressure was. With the VA patient population, there were several hundred thousand data points. The fascinating part was the discovery that BPs were better controlled in the fall than in the spring. What you can learn when you have the data...

Dr. K. quotes Peter Drucker as describing health systems. Drucker says they are "very complex". Dr K's un-named mentor always told him that "Beginning are messy". We need to at least be at the messy beginning of beginning to use the data we gather about this complex system which is US healthcare.

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