One-On-One With Dr. Hacker
William Hacker, co-chair of the National Governors Association health information protection task force, doesn't have to think hard to come up with a come-back for jokes about his last name. "My brother-in-law's name is Hatcher and he's an obstetrician, so I can diffuse the hacker point," he told us.
But the Kentucky public health commissioner has had to think hard about the verb, in his capacity as a government official and advisor to NGA's State Alliance for e-Health.
"In their wisdom, NGA recognized that public health entities have a lot to contribute to a health information exchange" that many others don't generally recognize, he said on Thursday. Public health departments use health data, stripped of personal identifiers, to track all manner of diseases and medical trends.
"We can back-up advisories with firm data, which the physicians don't have," Hacker said. "That reporting piece is done today by fax or telephone or paper. If we can make it electronic or automatic that decreases the burden on the private physician."
E-health improves efficiency both for the sender and the receiver of the digital information, he said. "The quicker we know about it, the quicker we can respond." But until we can assure patients that their sensitive health information is recorded in a secure manner, we will never experience the benefits available to us, Hacker added.
"The truth is the digital world today is probably more protective than a paper chart" because of the embedded audit trails, "but from the public's point of view, that is not the case." Read more about this in Technology Daily's PM Edition. -- Aliya Sternstein
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