Resigning health IT chief: Efforts on track

Doctors must adopt electronic health records or risk losing their competitive edge, he says.

By David Glendinning, amednews staff. May 15, 2006.

Washington -- National Health Information Technology Coordinator David J. Brailer, MD, PhD, announced late last month that he would step down on May 19. For the past two years, he has headed the federal effort to get the majority of U.S. patients equipped with an interoperable electronic medical record within the decade, a call made by President Bush in 2004.

AMNews spoke with Dr. Brailer after his announcement.

Question: What made you decide to leave?

Answer: When I was negotiating this job, I was very clear that I was not able to move my family to Washington and that my period of service would be at most two years. I felt then that if I wasn't able to get the foundation set and get people moving in the right direction, I should leave after two years anyway because it would be a failure. There was no drama to it. I felt a very strong personal obligation to give something back because I got so much from being a doctor and an entrepreneur in health care. But in the end, my time was up.

Q: When it comes to getting health IT into physician offices, what has your office accomplished?

A: First, we've been able to move health IT from an obscure area that only geeks and tech types understand to an issue of national mainstream importance, to get people to understand that this is not about software and computers, it's about what happens in doctors' offices and in patients' lives. The only way I thought we could do that is if we demystified health IT and got it out of the realm of data and widgets and digits.

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