Dr David Brailer, the man charged by President Bush with ensuring that half of all Americans have a portable electronic health record within a decade, is to step down two years after taking on the job.
He said on Thursday he was leaving his job as national co-ordinator for health information technology for family reasons and because the programme “is now mature and moving in the right direction”.
Dr Brailer, who spent a year in the White House preparing the ground for the programme before taking his current post, has commissioned a string of initiatives aimed at getting hospitals, doctors, health plans and IT vendors working together to deliver an initiative intended to improve the quality of care and potentially lower its cost.
These range from setting standards for what a record should look like, ensuring they can be made to work together, tackling difficult issues around privacy, and creating a body independent of government that will evaluate progress over the next decade.
Dr Brailer, in an interview with the Financial Times, insisted there was “no drama” about his departure. “Surely some people will use my leaving to attack the president or to say the programme is not going well,” he said.
But the reality was that “the wheels are turning” and the programme was progressing better than many people had expected. He has been commuting from San Francisco and “it’s been a huge personal agony for me” to leave his family weekly, he said. “I really need to get home”. He will stay on as vice-chair of a key advisory committee on the programme, while also advising the White House on consumer issues.
Dr Brailer said the programme is a “a really long term change” and “if anyone expected me to stay to the point where every doctor and patient has an electronic health record, that was a profoundly unrealistic expectation”. He added that if he had stayed much longer it would have been difficult for the president to recruit a successor for the rest of his term
Janet Marchibroda, chief executive of eHealth Initiative, a national lobby for electronic records, said it was sad to see Dr Brailer go. But “there is now so much momentum, and he has built such a strong infrastructure around him that I think it will be OK. I don’t think it means the momentum will slow down”.
