Today THCB comes to you from the Salt Palace, just across town from the Mormon Temple.  Yup, TEPR is in Salt Like City, Utah, and I chose this as a nice occasion to get to one of my favorite places (Park City) and do a little cave exploring, mountain walking and paragliding (and hanging out with my friend Regina). Oh, and TEPR is going on here too.

As I sit here the first major technical snafu of the conference is ongoing as David Sundwall, the head of Utah’s department of health is telling us that not only Utah’s CHIN/RHIO, called the Utah Health Information Network (UHIN), whatever is better than anyone elses, but also quite impressively has 100% of hospitals and 90% of doctors on the system.  (The other slides of what he wanted to show about the interloper Johny come latelies in Indy and Massachusetts are not working, hence the PowerPoint data loss in the picture below).

UHIN has all HIPAA transactions on that platform and he wants to add the clinical part and public health reporting to that….and then add that to other RHIOS. But what he wants eventually is a single standard connection for all users everywhere.

And then he makes the logical leap, which is that the important information is in the physicians office and that needs to be made electronic. Otherwise the important data has to be re-keyed

56% of physicians here allegedly have EMRs. I’m not sure I believe that, but CPOE is up at 34% of hospitals, lab is 65%, radiology in that range (Yup, Intermountain has a huge market share here– can’t you tell? Here’s more from Brent James about Intermountain’s system).

So we’ve got the RHIO here in Utah, we’ve got a more advanced medical system in terms of IT use, and it’s all happening here (if not in the rest of America)….. and of course the skiing is the best in the world….but make sure that you the miss the trees in the back of Jupiter Bowl at Park City.