HHS Secretary Equates Health IT to ‘Burden’ for Doctors

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price advocated Thursday for reducing the burden placed upon physicians and health care providers by the health technology that is otherwise meant to improve care for patients. Speaking at his first Health Datapalooza as the head of HHS, Price said the proliferation of health IT is something that “can have remarkably challenging and sometimes destructive consequences.”

Tom Price, MDPrice — a physician himself — spent the majority time Thursday focusing on how the various data scientists, technologists and health care personnel gathered in the room could make “health IT work for clinicians, work for the folks providing care” and arguing that “technology should make the capture and the sharing of data easier for clinicians and not more challenging.”

“We simply have to do a better job of reducing the burden of health IT on physicians and all health care providers,” he said. “The promise of big data and health IT is so great, absolutely remarkable. But we must not, cannot continue to get this wrong with the sense that sometimes comes out of this town, and that is a one-size-fits-all, inflexible system for our nation’s physicians and patients simply will not work”...