Blumenthal: Electronic health records, despite flaws, make doctors better

When Dr. David Blumenthal was appointed in 2009 by the Obama administration to coordinate national efforts to promote electronic health records, his wife thought it was "a huge failure of vetting," he told an audience at a Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare event last night. She manages their home computers. And he had not grown up as someone naturally interested in information technology. Blumenthal, who left his federal role earlier this year and is a Harvard Medical School professor of health care policy, said that as he learned to use the electronic systems as a primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in the early 2000s, he became a believer. Quite simply, he said, the electronic records made him a better doctor.