They dominated the headlines, both in the mainstream and in the healthcare IT-focused media. We asked Healthcare IT News readers to pick the people they believed had and would continue to have the biggest impact on healthcare IT on the policy front, as a healthcare provider and as a vendor. The choices – from more than 1,100 respondents – were clear.

POLICYMAKERS

More than 33 percent of the votes for most influential policymaker were cast for then Presidential candidate now President-elect Barack Obama. Obama has pledged $10 billion a year over the next five years to help boost the adoption of healthcare IT.

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, the winner in the policy category for 2007, garnered the second most number of votes, with more than 18 percent. The rest of the candidates in this category, including Republican presidential candidate John McCain, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, each landed about 6 percent of the votes. But each had ardent champions.

Narayanachar S. Murali, MD, of Orangeburg, S.C., cast his vote for Obama. “When the mess cannot get any worse,” he said, “we need direction from the very top. If Barack Obama falls prey to the lobbyists and decides to ignore healthcare reform it will haunt the Democratic Party for the foreseeable future.”

“What is the strongest ally for healthcare IT other than the president-elect?” asked Maria Filamor-Robinson, a nurse at Woodland Heights Medical Center in Lufkin, Texas. “Healthcare IT needs a very strong supporter from administration for its realization. I think with Obama’s support, more people if nothing else are more open to its concept and possible implementation.”

“Michael Leavitt is the captain of the ship that is driving the mechanism that enables caregivers at the local level to facilitate change,” one respondent said. “His vision to deliver appropriate care at lower cost is being implemented by individuals and institutions nationwide.”

PROVIDERS

C. Martin Harris, MD, CIO of the Cleveland Clinic, won the provider category of newsmakers with 31 percent of the vote. The Cleveland Clinic is partnering with Google to launch a pilot program that will use Google’s new services to provide patients with greater control and access to medical records.

“Innovation is having vision to do what others have not, being the first entry into a market or task or solution to a problem,” said one respondent. “Clevland Clinic has done this with the huge piggyback onto the Google ehealth solution offered to their patient data base and millions of people across the globe.”

“Cleveland Clinic has been a pioneer in electronic patient records and sharing patient information across the continuum of care from hospital, physician and post acute, home care and hospice,” said Joyce McFadden.