So, it is with great interest that I attended the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s seminar on How Technology is Enabling Dynamic Community Care Teams. My goal was to learn more about:
By Barbara Bix
Massachusetts Governor Patrick’s conference on health information technology, entitled “Improving Health Care and the Economy“, began yesterday in Worcester, MA. Dr. Blumenthal kicked off the conference citing achievements at the federal level and congratulating Massachusetts for being the first state to attain provider targets.
A down payment on health care reform
Quoting President Obama, Dr. Blumenthal told an audience of several hundred that health information technology, while important, is just the down payment on health care reform. More important, he said are the aspirations of change we plan to achieve as a country.
I started working in health care in 1994 in Boston, after working in high technology since the early 1980s. One of the first things that struck me was the relative lack of competition in the local health care industry.
Few distinctions between health care “competitors”
There was relatively little differentiation, from a prospective patient’s perspective, between hospitals–other than care level and location. When I polled my friends and colleagues, I realized that they could distinguish between Boston’s famous tertiary hospitals and the community hospitals–but couldn’t cite differences within either group.
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