Professor tapped for national health technology initiative

23.03.2009
A Harvard Medical School professor, , will serve as the country's national coordinator for health information technology, the Obama Administration announced Friday.

Blumenthal is a at Harvard.

He will be in charge of the that the economic stimulus bill has allocated toward digitizing medical records and improving health information technology.

This is not Blumenthal's first foray into politics. In the late 1970s, he worked for the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, . He also in the Obama for America campaign.

He has been an ardent advocate of health information technology. In 2006, Blumenthal co-authored a paper that found that only about 5% of hospitals nationwide were using electronic health records.

"We are pitifully behind where we should be. We must find ways to get more physicians to embrace this technology if we are to make major strides in improving health care quality," after the study was published.