… a story titled, “E-health records not enough, experts say”;

“We don’t have interoperability within electronic health records, much less between electronic health records,” Hughes said. “A lot of the party line on electronic health records is that we need to regulate that doctors must use them … but why don’t we make them better, so they want to use them?”

I have to agree… it always seems to make more sense to me when people talk about users adopting technology because they want it rather than because they are regulated to use it.

On the other side of the pacific, the US administration as appointed one Dr. David Blumenthal to look after this problem on behalf of US healthcare system. For anybody who missed it, there is over US$19bn allocated to healthcare IT systems in the recent US economic stimulus packages.

ChannelWeb’s “Obama Names New National Health IT Coordinator”;

The Obama administration on Friday named Dr. David Blumenthal the new national co-ordinator for health information technology.

Blumenthal will replace Dr. Robert M. Kolodner in what is seen as a key post in the Department of Health and Human Services, given the president’s ambitious health-care agenda and the more than $19 billion in health-care IT funds allotted in the federal stimulus package. About $2 billion of those funds are allotted specifically for HHS.

Blumenthal comes to Capitol Hill from Massachusetts, where he was most recently a physician and director of the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital/Partners Healthcare System in Boston. He is also a former Samuel O. Thier Professor of Medicine and Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, and before that a senior vice president at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and executive director of the Center for Health Policy and Management at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

The idea of an interoperable EHR seems to be gaining an increasing amount of mindshare (and funding) around the world. Maybe 2009 or 2010 will finally be the year when we see EHRs become a reality.