Thank You, Boston Globe

Today's Boston Globe had an editorial about MAeHC. Among the many things the article says is:

The state budget agreement reached this week includes $25 million to advance the creation of these systems. The budget doesn't specify who should get the money, but based on its success so far, the eHealth Collaborative deserves state support to identify other communities that would be willing to implement a health records system.

We greatly appreciate the Globe's recognition of the efforts of the many many people involved in the MAeHC pilot projects!

The article also had a couple of points that need clarification. First, the article states that we are "just starting" our Brockton pilot project, and it also states that "there will still be much work to be done in the three communities" once the pilot funding ends at the end of this year.

In fact, all three pilot projects began at the same time and Brockton is just taking longer because it is much bigger than the other two communities. Even so, all of the roughly 300 physicians in the Brockton project have their EHRs in place, and we have already started hooking them together, which should be completed well before the end of the summer.

At that point, all three communities will have reached a significant milestone that no other communities in the country will have achieved: they will be wired for healthcare. All of the physicians in the community will have EHRs, and all will be connected in a health information exchange that allows patients to enable medical record sharing among their providers. North Adams and Newburyport are already the only communities in the country that can boast such capability, and by the end of the summer Brockton will have achieved this elite status as well.

Don't get me wrong, there will still be more work to do in these three communities, but where is that not true?. In 1942 Joseph Schumpeter made popular the term creative destruction, which accurately describes every part of our economy except health care delivery. And even though information technology was embraced by other parts of economy many years ago, they're still discovering ways in which IT can improve the quality and efficiency of the products and services that they provide.

When the US military launched the first Global Positioning Satellite in 1978, it's goals were limited and clear: Improve the ability of the military to coordinate the movement of weapons, troops, equipment, and supplies. Now, thirty years later, GPS is being used in military and commercial ways that it's designers could never have imagined, and each year seems to bring even more uses. Similarly, when the first commercial cellular telephone was launched in Japan in 1978, they probably had only the smallest inkling of the kinds of innovation that would still be taking place thirty years later. If anything, even after three decades of use, the pace of change wrought by these technologies is not slowing, it's getting ever-faster. In 1978, the year that GPS and commercial cellphones were born, Microsoft was 3 years old and had 2 now famous employees, and the founders of Google and Yahoo were barely in elementary school.

Like GPS and cell phones thirty years ago, connecting up an entire health care community is a clear, discrete, "step-up" that provides tools that didn't exist before to change the way things are done. And like those technologies, providing the tools is only the first step, because they're only tools -- the creative energies of the people who use those tools will spur innovations in these three communities over the next 10, 20, and 30 years that we can't even hope to understand through the foggy lenses of today. That type of "creative destruction" isn't something that any of us can or should want to architect in a year or two or three.

The vision for a state funded program should be to get all communities in Massachusetts to the place that Brockton, Newburyport, and North Adams will be by the end of this summer. The goal should be to use state funds judiciously to do just enough to get this important part of our economy over the technological hurdle that is absolutely stifling innovation in health care delivery today. After that, step aside as fast as possible and let the market harness technology and human creativity in ways that only the market can do.

I can guarentee that thirty years from now the patients and medical professionals in Brockton, Newburyport, and North Adams will still be improving on the systems that were put in place by MAeHC in 2008. But they'll be able to look back and say that 2008 was when they got the tools to think about health care delivery in ways that they couldn't before. If you ask me, that will be the true measure of our success......