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Video: Aneesh Chopra on ‘The Daily Show’ for a long interview

Everybody else has the news about CMS offering leniency with Stage 2 Meaningful Use, letting providers use EHRs with 2011 certification to meet Stage 2 standards because so few vendors have been certified to the 2014 standards previously required for Stage 2. I won’t rehash here.

I will, however, share the very extended interview Jon Stewart had last night with former White House CTO — and, before that, HHS CTO — Aneesh Chopra on “The Daily Show.” Stewart is a comedian with a known liberal bias, but he is not a bad interviewer when dealing with a serious subject.

Stewart has been hammering the VA over its backlog of new registrations, and stepped it up in the wake of the recent revelation that VA bureaucrats in Phoenix were gaming the system to make it look like waits weren’t as bad as they really were. He’s also criticized the federal government for failing to link medical records between the Military Health System and the VA — you know, what we in health IT call interoperability. (In Part 4, Chopra discusses lack of interoperability in the broader healthcare sense.)

I found out about Chopra’s appearance last night shortly before the show aired. Unfortunately, we were having heavy rain at the time, and my satellite TV got knocked out, so I missed it. It’s OK, because the Chopra interview was long — more than 22 minutes — and the version that was on TV is heavily edited. Here’s the full interview of the “Indian Clooney,” as Stewart called Chopra, from the show’s Web site.

Part 1  (4:41)

 

Part 2 (7:27)

 

Part 3 (5:19)

Part 4 (5:35)

 

May 21, 2014 I Written By

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.

Another PHR venture (yawn) brings in some big names

I normally shy away from stories about the crowded and, to this point, spectacularly unsuccessful field of untethered personal health records, but one got my attention this week because of the names it’s just attracted.

Box, a cloud-storage company that offers something similar to Dropbox or Google Drive, has hired former White House CTO Aneesh Chopra and former Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman to, according to VentureBeat, “help the company push into the notoriously tricky health care vertical.” That’s an understatement. (Full disclosure: I serve on the advisory board of Health eVillages with Tullman, but I’m not in regular contact.)

Those hires bring instant credibility, though not necessarily success, and shows, as I’ve said before, that untethered PHRs might stand a chance once providers start addressing the patient-engagement requirements of Meaningful Use Stage 2. Emphasis on “might.” To date, nobody has found a way to get more than a small handful of patients to control their own medical data via PHRs.

Chopra — who once was managing director of the Advisory Board Co. and led open-data  efforts as secretary of technology in Virginia prior to joining the Obama administration — and Tullman know the health IT business better than most, but I still cast a skeptical eye on any PHR company until they prove to me they can capture a market. None ever has.

Good luck, gentlemen. You will need it.

 

March 19, 2014 I Written By

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.

Mostashari, Chopra get down to ‘Meaningful Yoose’ rap

Now it makes sense.

A couple weeks ago, I got the latest update from fictional EHR vendor Extormity:

Extormity to Federal Health IT Leaders – ‘Take a chill pill, fellas.’

Brantley Whittington, fictional CEO of make-believe electronic health record vendor Extormity, is urging Aneesh Chopra, Farzad Mostashari and Todd Park to tone down their optimism and exuberance about the clinical benefits and cost savings associated with implementing health information technology.

Whittington, speaking to reporters from the offices of a K Street lobbying firm in Washington, D.C., expressed dismay at the unbridled enthusiasm exhibited by White House, ONC and HHS officials. “For years, vendors like Extormity have worked hard to cultivate a healthcare IT culture that combines complexity with closed-mindedness, creating a pervasive and stifling sense of futility.”

“Instead of the sober and staid leadership we are accustomed to, these gentlemen are inspiring new models of industry development,” added Whittington. “The Direct Project is a great example of supercharged public/private collaboration designed to simplify the flow of health information without spending a dime of taxpayer money. This may benefit patients and providers, but the lack of convoluted infrastructure does little for the Extormity bottom line.”

“While I have been known to muster up some counterfeit fervor for shareholder meetings, the consistent passion and zeal demonstrated by these officials is proving disruptive to those of us dedicated to proprietary and expensive solutions,” added Whittington. “I suggest dialing back the levels on the gusto meter to preserve the status quo, stifle meaningful innovation and ensure consistent and sizable returns to a handful of large healthcare IT vendors.”

Chopra, Mostashari and Park are exuberant, that’s for sure. The first time I saw Park and Chopra share a stage together, I labeled them the “anti-bureaucrats.” I have since added Mostashari to that category. But it was only over the weekend that I learned that Mostashari and Chopra were getting down to the “Meaningful Yoose” rap from Dr. Ross Martin at a recent ONC meeting.

Here is the video of that spectacle, courtesy of John Lynn. (Unfortunately, I cannot find an embeddable version.)

Perhaps this is why Mr. Whittington wants the anti-bureaucrats to tone it down. Or perhaps (more likely) extormity feels threatened by innovation. Yeah, let’s go with the latter.

N.B. I am writing this while 33,000 feet above northeastern New Mexico, just about to cross into the Texas Panhandle, on a flight from Tucson to Chicago. I love me some Wi-Fi in the sky!

December 19, 2011 I Written By

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.

A public official with a sense of humor

It’s a good thing not all public officials are all work, no play. I’ve said for a couple of years that the tag team of federal CTO Aneesh Chopra and HHS CTO Todd Park are the anti-bureaucrats. (If you ever get a chance to see them speak together, take it.)

Add Doug Fridsma, M.D., Ph.D., the director of ONC’s Office of Interoperability and Standards, to that list. His Twitter account (@Fridsma) features a picture of himself as a Simpsons character. (Unfortunately, the place to do that, SimpsonizeMe.com, appears to be on hiatus.)

June 15, 2011 I Written By

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.