Healthcare IT Update

If HIT vendors want to sell their wares to physicians, they must acknowledge and fix this key problem.

A recently-held President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) meeting drove home a key point—medicine and IT are strange bedfellows.

Things got interesting Google CEO Eric Schmidt engaged physician and health policy expert Atul Gawande in a witty exchange. Dr. Gawende’s recently published book, The Checklist Manifesto, promotes checklists as a way to improve health care quality and at the same time lower delivery costs.

Google’s Schmidt responded by asking Gawande to imagine what it will be like to visit a doctor be like five years from now. “In my ideal world what would happen is that the doctor would type in the symptoms he or she also observes, and it would be matched against the data in this repository,” Schmidt said. “Then this knowledge engine would…