When the Health Blog finds an M.D. on YouTube singing a three-part harmony about health IT and the stimulus bill, we have no choice but to write a post on it. The lyrics are pure inside baseball: “I want to get in the act of HITECH, honey, and help build the network for interoperability. Dr. Blumenthal, won’t you give me a call so I can work at the ONC? … Now that President O is doling stimulus dough, we’ll have harmony.” And that’s just the opening. (HITECH is the part of the stimulus bill that provides billions for health IT; Blumenthal is the head of the ONC, the Office of the National Coordinator for health IT.) Ross Martin, the doc you see in the video window above, does have a day job — he works on health IT issues for Deloitte Consulting (so, yes, he’s clearly a believer in the benefits

of health IT; here’s a post that enumerates some of the challenges and risks associated with health IT). Martin’s “interoperetta” was a side project he wrote while he was on vacation and cut the track at his house in Maryland. When we got him on the phone, he told us he wrote it by creating a spreadsheet where each cell represented half a beat. “I printed out a little grid and filled in the boxes, like doing a crossword,” he said. You can see a picture of the grid, along with a bit more of the backstory, on Martin’s blog . One other detail: He pre-recorded the tracks, then wove them together on an audio editor and lip-synched his way through the YouTube video. “It was definitely a midnight to two in the morning kind of thing,” he said.

Here is the original:
Health IT in Three-Part Harmony