Guest post by Dr. Mary C. Burke, an attending physician in emergency medicine at Milford Regional Medical Center in Milford, MA.
From a health IT perspective, patient communication is broken. With more than 20 years of experience as an emergency physician, this point was driven home to me while using physical therapy to recover from a knee injury. The more I looked at information from my physical therapist and tried to remember the instructions he provided, the more I realized that this part of communication in healthcare is flawed.
I couldn’t reproduce my physical therapy exercises, and I quickly became a frustrated patient. I might have just thrown my hands up and hoped to figure it out eventually, but I wanted to be up and around on my two feet soon following a knee injury. Sound familiar? Apparently forgetting instructions and other information is pretty common and is playing out frequently in multiple scenarios. As I looked into information about understanding and remembering provider instructions, I quickly learned that this was not just my own personal experience.
If you love drama, there may be no better time than now to be in health IT. Specifically, the CommonWell Health Alliance movement – spearheaded by vendor giants Allscripts, Athenahealth, Cerner, Greenway and McKesson — to promote health information exchange.
However, as we all know, the one giant in the room not to be invited to the dance, Epic, is crying foul.
Perhaps there’s no better place for a case study on effective use of telemedicine and health IT interoperability than in my native South Dakota.
Avera Health, a network of hospitals, family care practices and specialty clinics located in South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska, opened an e-care hub in fall 2012 in Sioux Falls as way to shrink care gaps in rural medicine throughout the state and across the Northern Plains. Well, So. Dak is made up of nothing but rural areas, so this is the perfect place for an experiment.
The intent is to use electronic services to help rural patients stay closer to home and to boost small-town economies, but according to The Sioux Falls Argus Leader, officials say it also is creating a model for other systems nationally and beyond.
Guest post by Dr. Jeff Livingston, board certified obstetrician and gynecologist, MacArthur OBGYN.
Recently on The Daily Show, a very interesting topic was covered — the lack of interoperability of electronic health records. This was a huge surprise to me as one would not expect the Comedy Central to cover a topic frequently discussed only by health information technology policy wonks.
During the satirical editorial, John Stewart lambasted the fact that the electronic health records from the VA system are unable to communicate with the electronic health records of the Department of Defense. He pointed out the illogic of having two large departments in the United States government having two different systems that cannot exchange information with each other.
Guest post by Jonathan Bertman, founder and president of Amazing Charts.
The big news out of HIMSS13 was no surprise to those of us who work in the electronic health record (EHR) industry. The results of a two-year (2010-2012) survey from American EHR revealed that user satisfaction levels with EHRs are dropping in multiple areas – very bad news for EHR vendors.
The results didn’t surprise me at all. I talk to hundreds of EHR users each year about their concerns, and have divided the sources of their satisfaction into three broad areas. Users talk about their dissatisfaction with unusable systems because of poor design; unaffordable prices; and the inherent unfairness of the purchase process, often requiring multi-year contracts committing clinicians to a system they have never had a chance to use in the real world.
Guest post by Alex Horan is the senior product manager at CORE Security.
In 2012 we saw an increasing number of health breaches across the country – and across continents. We saw an employee’s lost laptop turn into a healthcare records breach of more than 2,000 sensitive medical records of Boston Children’s Hospital patients. We heard how one weak password allowed a hacker to access the Utah Department of Technology Services’ server and steal approximately 780,000 patients’ health and personal information. We even read about Russian hackers encrypting thousands of patient health records and holding the information for ransom for thousands of dollars.
Healthcare fraud or medical identity theft put both individuals and healthcare organizations at huge and severe risk. Since 2010, Ponemon Institute has annually benchmarked the progressing and evolving issues of patient privacy and security. The third annual study, released in December 2012, found that healthcare organizations still face an uphill battle in their efforts to stop and reduce the loss or theft of protected health information (PHI) and patient records. What’s more, data breaches can have severe economic consequences – and the repercussion costs are only climbing. The study estimates the average price tag for dealing with breaches has increased from $2.1 million in 2010 to $2.4 million in 2012. The report projects that the economic impact of continuous breaches and medical identity theft could be as high as $7 billion annually, for the healthcare industry alone.
Guest post by Ken Perez, Director of Healthcare Policy and Senior Vice President of Marketing, MedeAnalytics, Inc.
Recently, Mitch Seavey, 53, became the oldest winner of the Iditarod, the most famous dog sledding race in the world. At a distance of 1,600 kilometers, the Iditarod constitutes a race of supreme endurance. In dog sledding, the dogs that are chosen to lead the sled are usually the smartest, as well as the fastest, and they are appropriately called lead dogs.
The lead dogs in the realm of Medicare ACOs are the 32 pioneer ACOs, the selection of which was announced in December 2011 with great fanfare and optimism. With the greater risks (and rewards) of the pioneer ACO Model, the pioneers were widely considered the best and the brightest, the organizations most likely to succeed as ACOs.
I’m a cynic and I’m snarky. They are character traits earned from my days as a reporter at the newspaper. Constantly being pitched the greatest new thing meant to change the world when rarely these things lived up to their promise made me this way.
The latest offering from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), the site is being billed as a place for public input to update the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan.
According to the site, the plan outlines goals and strategies for the nationwide shift to electronic health records and information exchange, and for creation and spread of new health information technologies. “On this site, you can learn about these issues and be part of the public discussion that will shape the new plan. Whether you’re a patient, consumer, provider, insurer or IT developer, you should have a voice in this process.”
The rest of the site focuses on a variety of topics in discussion board fashion (think late ‘90s comment-based webpage) where consumers, the general public and anyone else with an opinion of any kind can respond to the seeded ONC topic.
Some of the topics include:
Current Efforts: Empowering consumer action
Current Efforts: Shifting attitudes
Supporting “shared decision-making” through health IT
Supporting “personalized healthcare”
The list goes on, with a few sparse comments to support the topics addressed, and some questions and responses.
The rest of the site features some meager announcements and a bit more info about PlanningRoom.org.
I’ve been a supporter of many of HealthIt.gov’s work and have featured it multiple times on this site for the availability of their information and the organization’s outreach to the public and the HIT community, but PlanningRoom.org is a limp attempt at a public information movement.
I’ve got to hand it to ONC for trying to engage the public in an information and educational campaign, but this effort wreaks of propaganda. For the most part, the comments are thin and generic and the “conversation” here seems someone staged.
This sure seems to resemble the acts of a start up site looking to generate page views and buzz. Certainly, there are people interacting with the site, but it comes off as fluff; a bit too polished if you will.
Call it the cynic in me, but at present, this effort just isn’t enough to make me think it’s going to drive any real change. Perhaps as it grows and evolves it will be worth a lot more, but in its current, state, not so much.
