Financial Ties to NJ Bill to Make Non CCHIT EHR Use Illegal

I previously wrote about a NJ bill to make non CCHIT EHR use illegal. I got an email from one of my readers that I should take a look at the financial ties to this NJ bill to see how that might have influenced its creation.

Turns out that Al Borg was already a few steps ahead of me and did the following research:

Some data on all of this:

About the main sponsor of the bill-

Ok, so once you discount for some of Al’s bravado it’s interesting to see the back history of the sponsor of this bill. Even if you don’t want to make the claim that he doesn’t have financial reasons for creating this bill, you can at least see where he drank the kool-aid.

Al also missed some other sources of campaign contribution for Herb Conaway and the co-sponsor of the bill Chivukula Upendra. I also found this page on the JN legislature site where I think we’ll be able to track the votes for this bill. Looks like it made it through committee (which it looks like Herb Conaway chairs) with a unanimous vote by Herb Conaway Jr., Connie Wagner, Mary Pat Angelini, Anthony Chiappone, Jerry Green, Linda R. Greenstein, Sandra Love, Nancy F. Munoz, Vincent J. Polistina, Joan M. Quigley, and Linda Stender. That’s a lot of people who probably aren’t getting good information on the EHR industry and CCHIT’s effectiveness.

On that note, someone mentioned in the comments of my first post that I should contact the representative from NJ and take a more proactive approach in responding to such a horrible bill. I’m not sure a representative from NJ really cares about what someone from NV might say, but I also think that it’s worth taking a stand on such a bill so that this bill doesn’t cause other states to consider similar bills. So, here’s the page where you can send a message to Herb Conaway, Jr and Upendra J. Chivukula. Should be interesting to see if they reply to a whole bunch of emails on the issue.

What’s even crazier to me is that Herb Conaway is a physician. I guess he hasn’t been practicing with an EHR lately.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • The wording in the proposed law is extremely vague. It almost sounds to me that selling a voice recognition dictation system would be illegal, or a medical billing system, or a PACS, or an anything that isn’t a fully-certified EHR, yet might do something along the lines of storing or creating medical information.

    Then again, maybe laws in NJ are just suggestions. After all, I’m quite sure I have seen speed limit signs in NJ, yet the governor there I hear drives 100+ mph…

  • The good doctor is an old fashioned drum beater. What your commentator is doing is akin to saying that Harold Hill in “The Music Man” was merely a crook. He is so much more than that. He plays on people;s desire to be on the right side, to be in the know. It is all as American as apple pie. Action to countervail his follies should be taken. Some novelist should also be following his every move as a 19th century personality in the 21st – not some sleuth of public policy.

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