Why Do Taxpayers Have To Pay For Another Health IT Initiative?
Much talk of President Obama ‘saving’ the US’ health industry, like Bush before him, and Clinton before him. A cornerstone of the latest ‘saving’ is a new Electronic Medical Records System. So, what’s going to happen to the two we already bought?
The latest health IT initiative is slated to get some US$20Billion (with a B), which proponents claim will fix all the problems, even reduce costs, for a federally controlled health system that has all the appearances of terminal collapse. Maybe so, but why reinvent a wheel? Actually, two wheels.
The Veterans Administration has two health systems that have pretty good reputations. The first, and oldest, is MUMPS, an abbreviation for Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System. The second is called Vista, short for Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture. It would be interesting to know how well these have done to contain costs, improve health care and delivery, etc.
FutureWare, like many other companies, has been monitoring the latest belief in hope over experience in national health care, and has not seen one reference to either of these health software systems. They both have been around for a while, and have track records that would engender envy by any of the certified entrants in the federally supported Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology, aka CCHIT, a quasi independent government entity that has to bless these systems in order to get federal (i.e., your) money.
Lately, there have been wild claims about the federal health IT initiative being an integral part of ‘saving’ the current economy, brought to you and me by the same cast of characters. This seems to be a massively blatant Red Herring, used as a cover for other failures, some possible and more actual. Not least, as has been demonstrated over and over, government involvement in software development for the next health IT system will insure failure. And then the powers that be will have a new initiative to (fill in crisis de jour here), always ignoring their handiwork on the previous train wreck.
Politics always trumps performance. Any self respecting software developer who works on this new Health IT Initiative would do well to keep that in mind.
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Tags: cchit, federal health initiative, health software, mumps, va mumps, veterans administration software, vista