Healthcare organizations maintain a juggling act of caring not only for their patients’ well being, but also the safety and security of the sensitive information that comes in the front door with every patient, doctor, technician and nurse. Data security issues are top-of-mind for information technology professionals in healthcare today, driven by a trifecta of factors: the large number of endpoint devices in use; a rise in the number and frequency of malicious attacks; and strict privacy laws such as HIPAA and regulations related to the Affordable Care Act.
For healthcare IT professionals, it has never been more important to ensure that endpoint security systems are up-to-date and functioning properly so that every endpoint is constantly secure and meeting compliance.
Take HIPAA regulations, which require that end user devices containing sensitive data cannot also have unapproved software running on them. Knowing exactly what software is installed on hundreds or even thousands of endpoints can be tremendously difficult, especially when there isn’t an easy automated way to track this information. Unapproved software is just the tip of the iceberg. What about approved software that isn’t working properly? For example, antivirus software installed on a PC running in a doctor’s office may be outdated, or completely disabled, without the administrator’s knowledge. This gives attackers an open door from this individual endpoint to gain access to the larger network—and a whole host of private information.
Dr. Lucy Hornstein, solo practitioner at Valley Forge Family Practice in Phoenixville, Penn., was not a proponent of electronic health records. An active physician blogger and published writer, she spent quite a few of her words on the technology’s uselessness.
They were expensive, overly complicated and tough to use and provided little return on the investment for users. Besides, most physicians, in her opinion, only implemented them because of meaningful use and the federal incentives they received for using them.
Paper, she had long decided, was good enough for her and during the first 21 years of practice in her own practice, she had no plans to change. It was only after the loss of one of her two staff members that she soon realized that she’d have to re-hire just to maintain her practice at its current load. However, that wasn’t an option for her. Neither, she thought, was adding an EHR to handle the management of the records because other than her perception of the technology, the self-described “dinosaur” didn’t have the budget for such an endeavor. She had zero for such technology.
Even if she had a change of heart and adopted the technology, she had not seen one system that was not cumbersome, not hard to use, intuitive to maneuver and or that offered her the option to meet the needs of her small practice while running the business efficiently.
Michael Nusimow, CEO, and Daniel Kivatinos, COO, co-founders of drchrono discuss the company, its goals, how to disrupt health IT and how mobile is being embraced by those in healthcare.
Tell me about drchrono, mission, goals and how it fits into the current landscape.
drchrono created a free electronic medical record (EMR) platform on the iPad, iPhone and cloud, and recently announced its newest app for iOS7. This is the first mobile EHR to support Apple’s new iOS7. Physicians are using mobile devices such as the iPad as a key business tool in their practice and it’s drchrono’s mission to enable the world’s doctors and patients to be better connected.
Daniel Kivatinos
On a more local level, we are looking to bring Silicon Valley technology and people into the forefront of the healthcare space. We are using cutting edge technologies like the iPad and SaaS software to deliver clinical and business tools for office based doctors.
Why use your talents in health IT? What drives you to serve this space?
We went to college together back East and several years after graduating we met up to learn that we both had family members with unfavorable healthcare experiences. We felt this urge to improve healthcare practices starting at the physician/patient level. We realized that a healthcare system built on faxing and shuffling papers is inefficient and thought so much more could be done to streamline the process via new technologies.
Based on our experiences, we witnessed that many office-based doctors were using paper charts for clinical work. If they have a patient taking 10 or more drugs or who has a very complex chart, they will waste a lot of time trying to understand the entire patient’s history. Seeing this need and personally suffering through bad healthcare experiences due to inefficiencies was the inspiration to start drchrono with the goal to digitize healthcare. We both knew we could build a software application that would create a better care experience.
Kareo, a company I have come to quietly respect (the company does not sponsor this site in any way) issued the following graphic (something else I have come to really like). I’m a visual person and there’s often no better way to convey complicated information like that found in health IT and I find the following graphic filled with much telling information, and seems to beg whether small practices are served well by EHRs.
This graphic seems to speak to a bigger picture of what’s going on currently in the space. This information tells the story of how it is becoming more difficult to maintain autonomy in private practice, but not impossible. With technology, small practices can thrive. But, is there enough focus on the small practices for technology to make the difference Kareo says it can?
Kareo has skin in this game, after all, and makes its position clear: “The solution is technology, and not just one piece of software but a fully-integrated seamless package of solutions from a single vendor … most physician practices know that to remain independent they will have to make changes.
“The willingness to change is important because success may rely on seeing your practice as a business and carefully considering and evaluating your bottom line. While many physicians in practices with five providers or fewer are still hesitant to adopt an EHR, the potential benefits are indisputable.”
The Accenture Consumer Survey on Patient Engagement explores whether doctors are delivering on the growing patient demand for access to EHRs and other electronic capabilities.
According to the info below, more than half of global users would switch to a doctor using EHRs with Brazil, France, Singapore and Spain registering well more than 50 percent of all patients willing to switch. In the US, the number of switchers hoovers at around 41 percent.
Though health IT is improving, pain points remain for most docs. That’s according to new data published by HealthBiz Decoded, a Xerox site.
The actual data was collected by research company Wolter Kluwers Health from 300 practicing primary care physicians.
Based on their experiences with health IT, most (or in this case more than 150) said technology is improving patient care and safety.
At the same time, just as many are frustrated by the technology in their practices and more than 60 percent believe health tech is not helping improve relationships with patients, surprisingly.
Some fascinating information from Industry View related to the value of EMRs/EHRs and the technology that drives patient satisfaction, especially as it shines additional light on the patient perspective of the technology.
As detailed here, electronic health records are appealing to folks and their value is beginning to be known among consumers needing care.
Of particular interest is that 82 percent of patients believe they receive better quality of care when their doctors use electronic records, and nearly half believe they’ve had better experiences at the point of care when their docs use the technology.
“If I ran my business the way our healthcare system operates, I’d go bankrupt,” is all I could think almost two decades ago, as I struggled with a life-or-death decision – which course of treatment to pursue for my prostate cancer.
As a self-made businessman whose key to entrepreneurial success stemmed from informing every business decision I made with objective data, I simply could not believe that none of my doctors could answer a seemingly simple question I posed. “Based on the experiences of other patients like me,” I asked, “which treatment is likely to work best?” Every doctor I saw was only able to answer with, “In my experiences…”
Data did not exist to offer me the information I desired to inform my decision.
My frustrating patient experience led me to envision what some experts now believe is the key to the cure. I imagined a health system in which every patient’s health experiences would be captured digitally and in which we would learn from millions of people’s lifetimes of health experiences (while safeguarding privacy).
Kareo, a company I have come to quietly respect (the company does not sponsor this site in any way) issued the following 
Accenture released the following infographic that illustrates the key findings of its recent survey (also featured in a recent post: 