HIMSS & Who is Promoting HIT in Stimulus Spending?

This story tells how HIMSS and Harvard's Blackford Middleton promoted spending billions on health IT in the stimulus bill.

HIMSS and Blackford believe that health technology will be the silver bullet that enables healthcare reform and kills/slows higher costs. That may be possible, but is highly doubtful because the billions are such a bonanza for the health IT industry.

Will this be yet another example of the stimulus billions being used to prop up large corporations, but not to save individual patients who are sick?

Not only does most of health IT vendor industry NOT care about whether healthcare reform succeeds or not, they actively fought to weaken Americans' rights to privacy and security. By law, industry cares about maximizing revenue, not treating the sick.

So the BIG question is: will the government require all electronic health records systems to have the tough privacy and security measures the public expects and needs to trust these systems? Will the government require electonic health systems to build in our legal and ethical rights to privacy up front?

Most of the HIT industry lobbied to sell the same old dinosaur products and against privacy. The incumbents are very powerful and not interested in change OR IN OUR PRIVACY RIGHTS.