Are health IT vendors trying to pull a fast one?

He's circulating a letter complaining about the behavior of the HIT Standards Committee, formed by NCHIT David Blumenthal to advise on the next phase of his work on the HITECH Act, the creation of standards for Health IT.

What Dr. Kibbe fears is a takeover of the government process by the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel, an industry-led group he says has locked out innovators and disruptive technologies, even mainstream IT vendors like Google, Microsoft and Apple.

Instead, he charges, the group is dominated by pre-Internet vendors like GE, Siemens and McKesson, vertically-integrated customers of those vendors, and large insurers.

How can we get optimal health IT policy decisions if we persist in favoring people vested in old or existing approaches, and excluding the innovators? The result will predictably “lock out” the experience of other industries - e.g., financial services, e-commerce, and online publishing - which have evolved broad and deep Web-based marketplaces in which proprietary software and hardware are no longer prominent.

"This is not an evidence-based or even a market-based approach to standards," Dr. Kibbe adds, "It's a power-based approach to standards."

Mainly what Kibbe, Director of the Center for Health Information Technology for the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), says he wants is an evidence-based approach bringing innovators with actual experience into the discussion.

Now, will Dr. Blumenthal listen? Did he pack his bad actors into the standards committee so he could ignore them, or did they pack into that committee so they could control him, and through him the market?