ONC on healthcare IT and patient rights: These systems "have to be rolled out to know where the problems lie"

An anonymous commenter to my blog post about the USA Today article on bad health IT (http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2015/02/former-onc-director-david-blumenthal.html) noted this, that I myself missed:

Anonymous said...

Gettinger's comment is stunning, especially coming from a director of safety and quality for HHS' Office of the National Commissioner for Health Information Technology:

 "You don't just plunk down EHRs and everyone's happy. You use an incremental kind of approach (and) that takes time, that takes energy and that takes effort," he says, adding that they have to be rolled out to know where the problems lie.

February 1, 2015 at 9:17:00 PM EST

(Writing of ONC's Acting Director Andrew Gettinger MD, Office of Clinical Quality and Safety, http://www.healthit.gov/newsroom/andrew-gettinger-md.)

If quoted accurately, that's likely the end of the line for me regarding ONC and any concerns about patients' rights.  Patients are to be used as live subjects to debug software.

That is advocating human subjects experimentation without informed consent with a technology known to cause increased risk, harm and death, and there's nothing to debate there.  This statement would be perhaps appropriate for someone writing about animal experimentation. 

My own mother's dead, in fact, from that type of attitude.

Gettinger's statement will serve as the cover slide to my upcoming legal presentations to American Association for Justice state chapters and at the AAJ national meeting later this year, as well as to the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ), to which I've been invited to speak.

-- SS