I was thinking "vomit and pregnancy", but same joke I guess...

I believe the problem with Payola (historically, although the "tuning out" may be a current issue) is that record labels essentially froze out smaller artists, since there's only so much air time. As a smaller artists (label or independent), you couldn't get your song on the radio without paying up, since the major promoter was already doing this. An extension of going after monopolistic practices, I guess.

The executive order requires interoperable systems for healthcare data, but does not require EMR applications. It says any system the fed buys must be able to share data with other systems, but not that any particular system is purchased for any purpose.

Also, does not apply to the private sector, although there are obviously many political movements to provide incentives and mandates in this direction.

The OP is a little misleading. The standards are being developed by HITSP (www.hitsp.org), the money is coming from the proposed 20-25B$ Obama wants to spend on this little pork project (and other legislation on the fed and state level similarly).

Your tax dollars at work. Note that the market has largely rejected the current generation of vendor products, since they do little to help the physician in their workflow.

Check Bush's state of the union address from 4 or 5 years ago. A 12 year plan to move to nationwide EMR records for everyone. Established the office of the national coordinator for healthcare IT which is the administrative arm to make this happen. This launched the National Healthcare Infratructure Network project (currently in its second revision), the Healthcare IT Standards Body (to harmonize competing HIT standards and establish new ones), the Certification Commission for HIT (to certify products for operating on the national infrastructure) and a number of other projects.

Obama would be smart to not throw all this out, but the knee jerk reaction is anything Bush did is bad.

Because they couldn't think of a method for making digital signals backward compatible with the analog signals. Since they are separate frequencies, providing both would take up a lot more bandwidth for TV. So, the plan is:

1) Deploy Digital on a separate set of frequencies.
2) Work through a transition period where both are available.
3) Have a cut off date where the old analog signals are shut down.
4) Re-allocate the old frequencies for another purpose.

We've been in step 2 for some time. Step 3 starts next month. Step 4 was decided some time ago through traditional lobbying and political payouts.

I think the heat is coming from:

1) Anything related to the FCC is a sore subject, since it seems like they have been operating at the whim of companies for a while and not in the interests of average citizens.

2) A call to delay the DTV transition seems like a very odd call given the effort and lead up to this point in time (and its priority to other crises, unless the "war on analog transmissions" is on the horizon). To have an announcement like this influenced by someone with a financial stake or friends with a financial stake is problematic.

So, we are judging him for what he does, and his team choices don't quite seem to line up with "change" (unless "change from George Bush" was the only requirement) and some of them seem flat out bad. And, he seems to be getting some bad advice at the same time, which he is acting on which is also concerning.

I'm still waiting for that train...

You don't need a "bar code reading PDA", bar codes can be read with a camera just fine. I just aim the bar codes on a book or CD at my web cam and the catalog software reads the code and sends it to Amazon for the detailed information (Delicious Library is the software, if anyone cares).

So, still not seeing the advantage of this over normal bar codes. I understand color adds some additional "bits" to the info, but bar codes can be printed on any printer and there's a monstrous industry built around small to high cost readers.

I doubt the money is to write new applications from scratch. This is being pushed because the average person outside healthcare doesn't understand why there is all the manual process when compared to banking through an ATM machine (hint, its unlikely your ATM machine will kill you) and there are large companies looking to make a killing dipping into this 25B kitty for the next few years. Since the previous several hundred billion has been thrown down the wall street commission structure without much control, this mountain will be doled out in an accountable and traditional fashion. Most likely free or low cost loans to purchase and train on existing products, probably those certified as EMRs by the federal CCHIT group.

Of course, like all this emergency spending, you have to wonder where all the holes are for the money. Total Health IT spending in the US annually is most likely around 20B, so increasing this means that a lot of new employees need to come into the picture (which is part of the intent, no doubt), but as others have pointed out in this thread there a lot of learning curve out there for EMR products.

So, we'll have a feast for the next few years hiring, training, and implementing the current generation of products which are fully rejected by the market they serve (EMR adoption is http://govhealthit.com/Articles/2008/02/Market-watcher-sees-steady-rise-in-federal-health-IT-spending.aspx and http://govhealthit.com/online/news/350171-1.html) and assuming this is half of healthcare.

Actually, insurance companies have of copies of their customers medical _claims_, not their medical _records_. A claim contains a few simple codes to indicate reimbursement, and often deviate quite a bit from what actually happened since the claim is fudged to get paid, not trying to document comprehensive medical information.

You could also get into people moving between insurance companies and paying out of pocket and paying because of car insurance etc etc...

An insurance company contains information about your health the same way your credit card company contains information about your automobile maintenance...

Christ!!! That's almost $250 a year for storage!!!!! Or, $75,000,000,000 if you're the govment!