New Reality TV Show to Follow ONC Leadership

The past six months have been really amazing here at Healthcare Scene. In October, we acquired Healthcare IT Central and associated health IT career resources and next week we’ll be hosting the first ever Health IT Marketing and PR Conference. While these are two major milestones for Healthcare Scene, we’re not stopping there. We have ambitious plans to really bring healthcare IT to the masses.

What many people who read this site don’t know is that along with my healthcare IT blog network, I also have a reality TV blog network that covers TV shows like Dancing with the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, and America’s Got Talent to name a few. Considering my passion for both healthcare IT and reality TV, I figured it would only be a matter of time until those two passions would be brought together.

I’m really excited to announce that I’ll be the Executive Producer of a new Health IT reality TV show that covers the inner workings of healthcare IT from the perspective of those working at ONC. Where possible, cameras will be following around the ONC leadership providing people an insight into things like meaningful use, RECs, ACOs, and ICD-10. The working name for the show is, “Under the Covers with ONC.” We start taping next week.

I want to applaud new ONC head, Karen DeSalvo, for really taking health IT to the next level with this show. It’s about time those people working so hard on something as important as health IT finally get some recognition. What better way to do this than to do a reality TV show?

Imagine how exciting it will be to see video of Karen DeSalvo tweeting “Call into the #HIT Standards Committee’s virtual meeting here: 1-877-705-6006.” Imagine how you’d feel watching the TV show if you were on the same call. You could say you were there. I wish we’d been filming when Karen DeSalvo Retweeted, “Hey, Tweeps, thanks for reading our workforce blog post. We have had more than 1090 readers so far!” Can you imagine the excitement of the moment? Now we’ll be able to share those type of moments with everyone.

Doug Fridsma, Chief Science Officer at ONC, commented on the show, “I can’t wait for people to finally see me get down and roll around with those healthcare standards. Who wouldn’t want to watch me work through the S&I framework?”

Some people have expressed concern that we won’t be covering their favorite government health IT project. To those people I say, go and create your own reality TV show. If I can do it, you can too. You may start by reaching out to Kathleen Sebelius who is supportive of this project but noted, “Good things the cameras weren’t rolling when we heard that Congress had slipped another ICD-10 delay into the SGR bill.” I think secretly, Sebelius is just jealous that Obama didn’t invite her to take part in his Between Two Ferns interview.

We reached out to Farzad Mostashari, Former ONC National Coordinator, to get his thoughts on the new ONC reality TV show. He replied, “I’ve been preaching for years that my hard working colleagues at ONC deserved more credit for the work they do. I just hope the show doesn’t get caught up in the petty discussions over whether it should have been blue button or purple button and instead focuses on things of substance like whether ICD-10, MU, etc are the ‘perfect storm’ of regulation or if it was more like a perfect earthquake.” I think we can all agree that it’s unfortunate we didn’t get this in place while Farzad was coordinator. His bow tie would have looked so great on camera.

We’ll be holding a special screening of the TV show at Health Datapalooza in June. I can already feel the energy and excitement of that screening with so many HIT Nerds present to see health IT reality TV. We’ll have a special area at the event where you can take a selfie with all your favorite ONC health IT heroes. Just get in line early. I’m pretty sure the Farzad line is going to be long. Can you imagine how many retweets you’d get if you got a selfie with two ONC Coordinators at once? I can’t wait to see you there.

UPDATE: For those who didn’t notice, this was an April Fool’s joke. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

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.

8 Comments

  • Helen,
    Yes, that’s on the third episode. I think we have Doug Fridsma against Jacob Rieder on that episode. You’ll be surprised who wins.

  • Alternative Titles:
    Fear and Loathing in the Humphrey Building
    The Hot Inside of Meaningful Use
    Sex and the Solo Practitioner

    Spinoff Series Episodes

    NCIS, Jethro tries to find MU3
    CIS ONC, Who killed the NIST protocols?
    Doc Martin, Attestation draws blood
    Call the Midwife, World’s longest gestation period – ICD-10

  • I was hoping for a makeover/style show where Farzad’s go-to move is to recommend a bow tie, every single time.

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