Government Leader home > August 2005 issue
August 2005; Vol. 1 No. 3
Inside Job: David Brailer, National Coordinator for Health IT, HHS
By Mary Mosquera
Like a matchmaker, he brings together health care providers and software companies to align medical and technical standards because industry could not do it on its own.
“A lot of what my job is about is bringing parties together and getting them to have common visions,” said Brailer, national coordinator for health IT in the Health and Human Services Department.
That translates into educating others and being optimistic and persistent, and he has built his career on those qualities.
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| | David Brailer, medical doctor and economist (Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School), came to Washington last year to direct the development of a national health IT network infrastructure. | |
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“A lot of my leadership style is about being able to help people see a new reality,” he said. “I do a lot of teaching, because these are tough things that they’ve never done before.”
One of the hurdles to physicians adopting health IT is the lack of product certification. Doctors want to be assured that the systems they invest in will do what they’re supposed to do in a timely manner to avoid office downtime.
Brailer, in his role as educator, routinely hosts dinners where he brings together physicians who have electronic health care records systems with doctors who don’t.
“It turns out, after the dinners a lot of those doctors [who don’t have systems] go out and buy electronic health records,” he said.
Brailer’s vision is to establish a foundation for quality health care and make sure the processes are driven by doctors, hospitals and consumers, and not government.
Brailer’s not an IT guy per se, but he did spend years in the private sector trying to get hospitals and doctor groups to improve their services and become more efficient.
“IT is not only technology, it is a metaphor that stands for that set of changes that will take us from the bad to good,” he said.
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