President Obama has brought yet another Harvard name to Washington. Harvard Medical School professor David Blumenthal ’70 will oversee a $19.5 billion project to digitize medical records, the Department of Health and Human Services announced earlier this month.

Blumenthal was named National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and will serve as one of three senior officials in health care in the Obama Administration, according to Kennedy School professor Richard J. Zeckhauser ’62.

Though the digitization project has come under fire for its cost and possible privacy breeches, colleagues and interest groups applauded Blumenthal’s selection.

As Director of the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital, Blumenthal was a pioneer in health policy, said Zeckhauser, who has authored several papers with Blumenthal and taught him as a student.

Prior to this, Blumenthal served as senior vice president at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and was a lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he earned a degree in public policy.

Zeckhauser called the appointment the culmination of 25 years of training.
He said Blumenthal is a “hard-headed enthusiast” and has the perspective to know that information technology will help the medical field, but is not a cure-all.

“This is the attitude we want—some people think that when we have information technology in place, it will solve all our problems” Zeckhauser said. “Even though he’s young, he possesses a wisdom and gravitas.”

Catherine M. DesRoches, of the Institute for Health Policy at Mass. General, said that when the Bush Administration first announced its goal to digitize medical records by 2014, there was no “baseline data” on current levels of digitized records.

Because of this, she and Blumenthal co-authored a study charting rates of electronic medical record keeping. The research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine last July, found that only 4 percent of physicians had a fully functional electronic records system, and only 13 percent had a basic system in place.

DesRoches said she was not surprised that the Obama administration tapped Blumenthal for the post.

“This is an area he knows an awful lot about,” she said.

Blumenthal was also senior health adviser during President Obama’s campaign and worked on the health policy staff of Senator Edward M. Kennedy ’54-’56 from 1977 to 1980.

PROJECT CHALLENGES

The targeted implementation date for the digitization project, 2014, is viable, said Zeckhauser, but its success will depend on how much political objection there is in the interim—the roadblocks to implementing this project are administrative, not technical, he said.

“Will there be some big privacy blowup that says you cannot use this record?” Zeckhauser asked.

But Mark J. Schlesinger, a professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health, said that while he lauded both the project and the appointment, he was skeptical as to whether the project could be completed by the expected date, as Europeans have been working toward this goal for decades but have not yet reached it.

“We are not just trying to create a system, but create a system for physicians and patients to more seamlessly share,” he said. “That takes a lot of learning, practice, and refinement.”

Brian Wagner, director of Government Relations at eHealth Initiative, a non-profit umbrella organization that lobbies for information technology in the medical field on behalf of 165 member organizations, including AARP and the American Medical Association, called this project a “game changer.”

Wagner said that the amount of money this package provides is equal to the funds available in the entire information technology industry on an annual basis.

Though he said his organization applauded Obama and Congress for acting quickly with this appointment, there is worry about how funding will actually play out.

Wagner said federal rules requiring “meaningful use” of health IT to qualify for funding were vague, and concerns arise regarding privacy provisions, how grants will be awarded, and areas not funded by the project.

Schlesinger said that these programs are likely to be met with skepticism because results will not come for a while, which creates a thorny political situation.

“You are spending money, not getting any benefit, but making people mad in the process,” he said.

He said that Blumenthal has tremendous patience and perspective to see the project through, and that he would not have taken on the project if he did not see it as a long-term engagement.

“I’m sure his expectations are appropriately set, but it is a frustrating position,” Schlesinger said. “It has considerable potential to be transformational, who knows how long people want to put up with the angst of that.”

Blumenthal declined to comment for this article.

—Staff writer Laura G. Mirviss can be reached at lmirviss@fas.harvard.edu.