Dr. David J. Brailer has an ambitious job description--to aid the widespread deployment of health information technology within 10 years.

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson appointed Dr. Brailer as the first National Health Information Technology Coordinator

In this new post, he's the federal government's point person charged with spurring the adoption of health information systems throughout the industry.

"The automation of health care is inevitable," Dr. Brailer said at a meeting sponsored by the Center for Health Transformation. "We're not at the if stage anymore, we're at the when stage."

But that change won't automatically be a positive one, and Dr. Brailer said he plans to work to make sure the change is a welcome one for both physicians and patients.

Dr. Brailer, who is board certified in internal medicine, was most recently a senior fellow at the Health Technology Center in San Francisco, which is a nonprofit research group. He was also the chairman and CEO of CareScience, Inc., a provider of care management services and Internet-based solutions.

Dr. Brailer also designed one of the first community-based health information exchanges in Santa Barbara County, Calif.

Now on the national stage, Dr. Brailer said he believes that the first step in integrating information technology into health care is the automation of the physician practice.

"The way to help hospitals to automate is to get physicians to be accepting and desiring of these technologies in their own lives and careers so they'll be desiring and accepting in the inpatient setting," Dr. Brailer said.

But getting physicians to buy into IT will be difficult because of past failures. "My peers are somewhat jaundiced and cynical," he said. "We've seen many things come down the road that were supposed to be solutions."

One approach that could help foster that buy-in is to develop market agents and institutions that would aid physicians in choosing technologies that meet their needs, Dr. Brailer said. "We need to be able to determine how each product in the market meets a certain level of minimal specifications."

Dr. Brailer also wants to make his approach patient centered and that means staying away from a one-size-fits-all approach.

"I think we have failed to put our finger on personalization."