Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act

And apparently the entire room got silent because they knew at that moment accountability was about to be unleashed on all of them.

And you think about the billions, maybe even trillions, I mean, over time, but at least billions and billions that we've spent all the way up to now AI, the High Tech Act, all the things we have, And I think if you ask most people, I generally believe most would say we've not tapped the true benefit of all these solutions we've put in and technologies have there.

Where do you see still some of the greatest opportunity, not only in the investments we're making today, but maybe even some of the investments we've made in the past?

You're 100% correct.

You did not see the kind of communication gaps that, uh, that, that I've been seeing the last, I don't know how many years now.

Whenever the HITECH Act was adopted, which, which was a good thing, uh, but the requirement that all hospitals who receive Medicare funding of any type have to go to an EMR, electronic medical record, which has a lot of good, positive things associated with it, like audit trails, you know, and the ability to catch people changing records in ways that were a, a bit more difficult to prove prior to this, has brought with it its own set of problems in, in documentation and communication.

I mean, now, now we live in the era of drop-down menus, you know, and-

Hundred percent.

um and directly preparing them for that future in terms of research i think a lot of the winds have changed recently and are blowing strongly to more practical applications i don't think there's as much space for you know just theoretical research in this field i think the funding models are changes and i think ai has actually created a lot of urgency away from just theory that we want to see results and that's a really tough balance because you can't just open the data up in healthcare Everyone seems to be waiting for who's going to make the first misstep on large scale clinical data for AI.

It's a lot similar, very similar, you know, either when the HIPAA rule came out or the HITECH Act and the penalties, like we were all waiting for who's going to get punished first.

And now with AI and even higher demand for this data, we're kind of waiting for someone to make the first mistake so we can all understand what not to do.

And I think maybe a year from now, we're going to see those examples.

Health records.

The HIPAA rules and the HITECH Act push privacy and security obligations onto business associates, billing firms, labs, software vendors, anyone touching PHI.

So lawmakers are basically forcing the safety rails on, industry by industry.

Even outside those regimes, you've got the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act steering who you partner with.

And so I basically just sort of created my own portfolio with open source projects and got myself a job with a government contractor, learned a lot more about all the agency problems that you see.

I was one block away from K Street in Washington, D.C., so I was literally there when the sausage was made, particularly when the HITECH Act from Obama was passed, which mandated... digital records for healthcare systems across the country.

And so that's an important piece because like I saw that and I found myself in healthcare.

My dad was able to connect me with a company called Cerner at the time, Oracle, like maybe five years ago.

So the fact of the matter is that there were doctors before the electronic health record mandate that was part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

So that act had an act within it that was called the HITECH Act, which was Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health, HITECH.

So within the bigger act was a smaller act.

And that smaller act required every doctor in every hospital who takes care of a Medicare patient to have a government-certified electronic health record.