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Gephardt jumps on the PHR bandwagon

Personal health records firm MMR Information Systems and its MyMedicalRecords subsidiary have enlisted Former House Democratic Leader Richard A. Gephardt to spread the word about PHRs to the public, and, more importantly, help the company get its hands on some of the economic stimulus money. According to a news release, Gephardt will join MMR at the HIMSS conference in Chicago on April 5.

The former Missouri congressman has been on the board of Los Angeles-based MMR since 2007, so maybe it’s going too far to call it bandwagon jumping. But he’s not the first ex-House heavyweight to get behind a PHR effort. As I reported exactly one year ago today, former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) became a strategic advisor to the Goeken Group, the Naperville, Ill.-based parent company of PHR vendor Global Med-Net.

To be honest, I haven’t hear a peep about the Hastert-Goeken effort since I wrote that story, but I also haven’t seen much progress in real PHR acceptance by the public in the last year. It’s going to take someone more charismatic and influential than Gephardt to sell the American people on the idea of keeping their own medical records electronically. And no, I don’t mean influential like knowing people on Capitol Hill, which Gephardt certainly does. I mean someone who can have a real influence on consumer behavior. That person most certainly will not be a politician.

March 24, 2009 I Written By

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New CMIO magazine

Believe it or not, in this age of media bankruptcies, there’s a new publication starting up in health IT. Or maybe it’s not so unbelievable, given the $19.2 billion for health IT in the stimulus and the general importance IT is getting in the nascent health-reform debate.

The first issue of CMIO magazine will be available in digital form on April 2 and the print version will debut at the following week’s HIMSS conference in Chicago. You can sign up now for a free print or digital subscription and for the forthcoming CMIO News newsletter at http://subs.cmio.net. You don’t even have to be a chief medical information officer to subscribe, but that’s who the magazine is geared toward, obviously.

In case you were wondering, I contributed two feature stories to this issue. Why else would i mention it?

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More CCHIT news

I may be inviting some more venomous comments with this post, but here goes anyway. The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) announced Monday that the federal economic stimulus legislation has caused the commission to move up its “advanced technology” certification programs for clinical decision support, interoperability, quality and security to 2010 instead of 2011. Because of this new development, CCHIT has pushed back its annual volunteer recruitment period to March 26 through April 20.

Meanwhile, CCHIT Chairman Mark Leavitt, M.D., Ph.D., has agreed to meet with some of its harshest critics, namely open-source software developers, in a session at next month’s HIMSS conference. The meeting, led by Fred Trotter and Linux Medical News editor Ignacio Valdes, M.D., is scheduled for Monday, April 6, at 2 p.m. in Room 10d of the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago. Trotter, who calls the encounter “like offering to meet with the Rebel Alliance at the annual Death Star conference,” has more details here.

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I'm a freelance healthcare journalist, specializing in health IT, mobile health, healthcare quality fast $5000 loans-cash.net with bad credit, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.