Dear Clients and Friends,
Entrepreneurs have been described as “crazy diamonds” or “mysterious beings that hold the secret to boosting growth and creating jobs.”
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We decided to dedicate the front page of this month’s Newsletter to Farzad Mostashari, the outgoing National Coordinator of Healthcare IT. To us, he is truly a modern-day entrepreneur and one of the most effective “Health IT Czars” that the agency has ever seen.
Mostashari was given a daunting task of allocating billions of dollars of government grants and stimulus funds to make our broken healthcare system more efficient through the adoption of the most advanced technologies. We have noted in the past that irrespective of our belief in government intervention, in this case, these grants and stimulus funds were the “seed money” which spurred one of the most dynamic phases of HIT investing.
The results speak for themselves. During Mostashari’s tenure since 2009, the adoption of EHR has tripled in doctor’s offices and increased five-fold at hospitals. Over half of prescriptions are now electronic. Functionalities for population health management are now available. Standards and protocols for information exchange and interoperability are now being implemented. Hospital readmission rates are down and we are beginning to see the results of pay for performance through intelligent measurement tools. On the back of favorable returns on their HIT investments, venture capital firms are now funding companies that give us new tools to manage our own health. As consumers, we will soon be able to download our own health information from EHR’s. The list goes on and on.
We will miss Mostashari’s expertise, enthusiasm and commitment to innovation. In his own way he is a passionate entrepreneur, a crusader against paper, a change agent who pushed both providers and payors kicking and screaming to adapt to the digital age. His famous quote saying “we can still do big things as a country” should make us all proud to be part of this industry.