Leonard Kish talks to Douglas Fridsma, President and CEO at American Medical Informatics Association, about his work in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, or ONC, and the barriers to implementing MIPS in the most useful and transparent way. In order to communicate the data, of course, we’ll need informatics; but how will that work? And which comes first, policy or technology?
Leonard Kish: When you first began your studies in medical informatics, was there a sense that the field was a science?
Doug Fridsma: After working on the Standards of Interoperability Framework for the National Cancer Institute – which was essentially crowdsourced, I engaged government, research and other pharmaceutical companies and standards organizations to basically come up with what that standard should be – I had an opportunity to go out to the University of Arizona and ASU. Ted Shortliffe, who had been my mentor at Stanford, had just been appointed to be the Dean of the new medical school at the University of Arizona.
Disclaimer: I have never had cancer. Therefore, at the most basic level, I do not have the right to pontificate about dealing with the dread disease.
Health 2.0’s numbers in our report were $4.8 billion for the year, as shown on the left. (You can see more on these and some other data in our 
And that was the number I’d started the original spat about. But when I looked at the post they released in January 2016, not only was the number for 2015 at $5.7 billion (remember Rock Health, Mercom & Health 2.0 all put it in the mid-high $4s) but the 2014 number had somehow climbed from about $3.5 billion to $5.1 billion. 
Again 
