Leave the Blaming, the Gaming, and Point Scoring at the Door
There are challenges ahead but they can be solved and we can move forward. Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke to a standing room only house at HIMSS14 in Orlando as Wednesday’s keynote speaker. The former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State knows a lot about the history of health care reform and moving medical records to the digital world here in the US. She was well known as the First Lady that tried to bring the biggest health reform to our country in the early 1990s. She likened it to walking into a chain saw. She worked as a senator with Newt Gingrich and Bill Frist to bring attention to and accelerate the use of digital health records. She used it as an example of how the issue was truly bipartisan.
She came to thank us for not giving up the fight and forging on to solve today’s health IT challenges. She thanked us for realizing that evidence based data is what should cause us to react and make decisions. I think Farzad told her to say that one. She defended the ACA saying look to evidence to determine what is working and what needs changes.
She made a case for how important this all was as she told her story of visiting Katrina survivors taken in by the city of Houston. Millions of medical records were lost forever and the immediate emergency of treating and prescribing without that information.
After her opening remarks, Mrs. Clinton sat down with HIMSS CEO and President Stephen Lieber for some Q&A. In true Clinton fashion you had to be amazed at what she knew and how she saw the world. From explaining the relationship we have with Russian President Vladimir Putin to the situation in Ukraine, she never missed a beat on a name or city most of us couldn’t pronounce without some practice. Coming from a true glass ceiling breaker she says things have changed but there needs to be more. She shared her personal account of events leading up to the day we found Bin Laden. And we did not find out if she was running in 2016.