Earlier this week we posted our interview about the future of health IT with Carol Diamond of the Markle Foundation. (Part one, and part two). Today we'd like to point you to The Hill 's interview with Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt on the same topic.

Two points struck us. First, neither the article nor the full Leavitt transcript mentions the word "privacy"—a big issue both for policymakers and for the public who keep reading about nosy hospital staff, researchers who do sloppy things like leave laptops with patient records in the car, and thieves who steal credit card numbers and other financial identity information from medical records. Not insurmountable but essential if we're going to get the country on board with health IT. Second, Leavitt really depicted the health IT challenge primarily as a technology question involving interoperability (letting different computer systems talk to each other) while Markle's Connecting for Health program and conversations with some other experts have made us think about a far broader range of policy challenges that won't be solved only by the computer geeks.

We did like that Leavitt pointed out that the electronic medical records (with appropriate privacy safeguards) won't just improve care for individual patients. Properly designed, they will provide a huge data pool for researchers to track public health threats, emerging trends or epidemics, drug side effects and the like as well as do research into what treatments work best for patients. But first we've got to get there. Leavitt sounds optimistic, but we've heard that health IT is just around corner for some time. Let's hope he's right sooner rather than later.