Information Technology Is Key to Health Policy

When I was a child, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a hero to our family. (I didn’t become a Republican until I was in law school, you see.) At the time of his death, he was the leader of the free world and the most prosperous country on earth. He had serious chronic diseases, including high blood pressure and congestive heart failure. The best that the heart specialist who saw him could recommend — the state of the art of the day — was bed rest and one medicine, digitalis, that was derived from plants and first used more than 100 years before.