“Established technology is being given a federally funded new lease on life,” athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush said. “Traditional health software now is on Medicare, being kept alive like grandma.” Bush dubs this program as the “cash for clunkers” program for health IT leaving no doubt what his opinion is regarding the legacy vendors’ solutions.
“I know of no industry where technology is as despised as it is in health care. It’s a statement that it took government money to incentivize healthcare providers to finally do what virtually every other industry has done .”
While one might dismiss Bush’s comments because they are coming from a company with a dog in the fight, the feeling is nearly universal amongst physicians who are the most important users. The best evidence of how abysmal legacy healthIT is, is that the market leader is having trouble getting medical practices to adopt their software even with huge subsidies from large health systems.
In the course of discussions with large health systems, they share their experiences of deployments of a mega Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and how they were offering subsidies to affiliated doctors to adopt the same system. When pressed about how broadly it was being adopted by non-employee physicians (i.e., MDs who have a choice), the penetration was staggeringly low — 0.2% was the average of those who shared figures. This was despite the fact that they were subsidizing 85% of the cost (the maximum allowed by Stark Law).
When I’ve spoken with doctors who have rejected the entreaties from their affiliated health systems, it’s more than the expense (even after a massive subsidy, it’s still several thousand dollars plus monthly costs). Rather, the complexity and lack of user friendliness is the bigger driver. A common statement one hears in healthIT conversations is that doctors hate technology or are afraid of it. Hogwash. They only hate bad technology. Consider the iPad. Doctors are the biggest buyers and it’s not just young doctors.
Flawed Reimbursement Model Leads to Flawed HealthIT
This begs the question, “why is healthIT so bad that massive government and health system subsidies are required to drive adoption?” And how can this possibly be good news? Let me address the issues and then I’ll conclude with the good news. While it may seem easy to bash legacy healthIT vendors, my experience has been that vendors reflect their customers. I would take this a step further. In the case of healthcare, customers reflect the reimbursement model. It’s a reimbursement model that is so broken Americans pay nearly twice as much as other countries to get inferior outcomes.
The “do more, bill more” reimbursement model in the U.S. has been at the root of healthcare’s hyperinflation (not so fun fact: while what we spend on all other goods and services has increased 8x since the 60′s, healthcare costs have skyrocketed 274x). The byproduct is a focus on activity rather than value/outcome. Not surprisingly, the primary IT focus has to get as big a bill out as fast as possible. Despite the fact that most physicians call the patient the most important member of the care team, in reality, the “patient” as architected into most healthIT has been little more than a vessel for billing codes.
More recently, there’s been a drive to add so-called Patient Portals to involve the patient. However, these have been more driven by marketing objectives than truly rethinking the care delivery model. Making the patients central in a system designed for optimizing billing is even less likely than Yahoo or AOL surpassing Facebook in social networking. Web portals are a good analogy for the change afoot. Patient portals are similar to pre-Google web search. That is, it’s not been terribly important and not a substantive stand-alone business. Obviously, Google changed that. Likewise, the next generation patient portals will have central importance in any outcomes-based model particularly with chronic disease that makes up 75% of healthcare spend.
It will expand from simplistic provider-centric patient portal to full-blown Patient Relationship Management as one of the leading thinkers in healthIT, Shahid Shaw, stated in a recent article in a HIMSS publication.
“It will be nowhere as easy for existing legacy EHRs to simply retool their current platforms, like they did for MU.”With that said, Shah outlines nine ways future EHRs need to support ACOs.
1. Sophisticated patient relationship management (PRM). According to Shah, today’s EHRs are more document management systems, rather than sophisticated, customer/patient relationship management systems. “For them to be really useful in ACO environments, they will need to support outreach, communication, patient engagement, and similar features we’re more accustomed to seeing, from marketing automation systems than transactional systems.”
In absence of getting information from their healthcare providers, consumers/patients aren’t sitting idly by. They go to “Dr. Google” looking for information to fill the gaps left by their healthcare providers. Searching for health information is the third most common activity on the web. One site alone — WebMD — receives over 100 million unique visitors every month. Rather than fighting this, smart doctors are using low and no cost tools to harness this energy. Read Doctors Success Hinges on Transactor to Teacher Transition for more.
The best place to get a preview of how system requirements are radically changing is to look at disruptive innovators such as White Glove Health and Qliance deploying a new care/payment model called Direct Primary Care (DPC). They are already operating in the patient-centric, accountable and coordinated models that will become the norm. These venture-backed healthcare delivery organizations were forced to look beyond the traditional U.S.based technology vendors optimized around the flawed reimbursement model that will rapidly wane over the next 2-5 years. In Qliance’s case, they looked at over 240 different U.S.-based EHRs before looking elsewhere. In healthcare-wonk speak, DPC organizations are the “Triple Aim” champs. That is, they have demonstrated the most impressive health outcomes while lowering costs and improving the patient experience. It’s asymmetric competitors like these that are motivating traditional healthcare provider to look beyond their traditional suppliers.
If you would like to be notified when the seminal paper on Direct Primary Care is published this Fall, please contact me via my LinkedIn profile – http://www.linkedin.com/in/chasedave.
Great Products Killed by Convoluted Decisions Processes
When I’m asked why I didn’t get back in to healthcare sooner given my background, I share one of my past experiences. I was at a well-recognized hospital implementing their patient accounting system and we needed to decide the unique patient identifier scheme. It’s an important decision, but they were in year seven of debating what the new scheme should be! It may seem like an absurd example, but it’s indicative of how interminable the decision processes can be in a health system. It virtually guarantees that the only companies that can survive those processes are incumbent vendors — breakthrough young companies die on the vine waiting those processes out.
Consumptive User and Economic Buyer Separation
The role of Chief Medical Informatics Officer (CMIO) is relatively new and long overdue. The idea is a senior level physician plays an integral role in IT decision processes. However, there are still many scenarios where the people who will actually use software are a great distance from those who pay for the software. In other industries, the rise of Software as a Service (SaaS) has closed or eliminated this gap where you see individuals and departments not waiting around for IT to pick something that they don’t want to use. Rather, they can directly contract with the technology company. Naturally, there isn’t unanimity amongst physicians so the physician representative(s) involved in decisions will never reflect 100% of their peers.
There was a parallel scenario 10-15 years ago when multi-million dollar CRM implementations from companies like Siebel weren’t embraced the way dramatically lower-priced Salesforce.com has been embraced today. A key driver of this is the user of Salesforce.com is often the purchaser. Typically, healthIT is at least 10 years behind other industries. Fortunately, the economics of cloud-based, SaaS software are finally coming to healthcare cleaving off some zeros from what is typically spent on legacy healthIT.
One Item For Which HealthIT Vendors are Fully Responsible
Most of the items above put the root cause at the provider level driven in large part by a misaligned reimbursement model. However, there persists one insidious practice. There are various ways for tech vendors to ensure customers stick around as long as possible — lock-in or loyalty. Successful SaaS businesses are built on the loyalty model. Rather than holding data hostage or locking customers into long agreements, they believe that the more freedom you give customers, the more loyal they become (assuming you deliver the goods). In contrast, there’s still the antiquated model of lock-in used by many healthIT vendors. For example, they make it expensive and/or difficult to get access to data in a system to keep any in-house or 3rd party built system from being integrated. These vendors pull it over on naive customers by telling them that it’s a ton of work when it’s only a ton of work if that vendor is incompetent. Like escaping an abusive relationship, healthcare providers must push back on vendors’ bad behavior or else they reward that behavior.
A corollary to the vendor lock-in is healthIT still largely operates in a model akin to Wang and Prodigy where one company supplies the technology from top to bottom. Since the mid-90′s, we have seen how the web has enabled a thriving, heterogeneous model. They byproduct is a vastly expanded market for all technology vendors – old and new.
The Good News
Tectonic shifts are underway. Smart healthcare providers are trying to avoid making the same mistakes newspaper companies made in the late 90′s. For those of us used to the convoluted, interminable decision processes of the past, it is breathtaking to see the decision processes of today. As I detailed in the rise of nimble medicine, not only are entrepreneurial ventures popping up like weeds, healthcare providers are getting far more aggressive about trying new models without doing the equivalent of organizing the Roman Legions.
A great example of this is the New York Digital Health Accelerator. As you can see on their website, they have convened some of the largest and most influential healthcare providers. These organizations recognize that with all of the new requirements coming at them, they need new solutions. This program not only puts in money ($300,000), more importantly, the healthcare providers are committed to mentoring and/or piloting software. The accelerator is modeled after a highly successful program called the FinTech Innovation Lab also run by the New York City Investment Fund. Recognizing that their legacy vendors are overloaded simply keeping up with EMR implementations, each health system leader I have spoken with says they have zero expectation they will get what they need now from their legacy vendors. However, they are clear that the new systems must tie in with the old.
The best news for healthtech startups is that, by definition, legacy healthIT is optimized around the flawed reimbursement model of the past. The disruptive innovators instinctually know that they will either have to build their own software (if there isn’t off-the-shelf software) or they can work with software companies that allow them to be nimble. There is universal agreement that anything less than a fundamental redesign of healthcare will fall short in solving the most important problem the U.S. and the world faces — spiraling healthcare costs. Disruption innovation is enabled, in part, by modern technology that doesn’t have pricing models reminiscent of the 80′s.
Writing the Book on Patient Engagement
These changes aren’t lost on the trade associations for healthIT — HIMSS. Many are calling this the era of patient engagement. Reflecting this, HIMSS has commissioned a book on patient engagement that I’m honored to be co-editing and writing the chapter on patient-provider communication. A major theme of HIMSS’ 2013 conference will be patient engagement so the book anticipates that theme. It has been exciting to learn about the broad array of new companies and approaches emerging to meet the needs of healthcare providers.
More Good News
As I outlined in Mr. Obama, Tear(ing) Down This Wall, one of the rare areas of bipartisan agreement is the need to modernize the healthcare system by making more information available to patients and other providers. This is in stark contrast to the silo’ed systems of today that lead to duplicate effort and wasted money.
Not only is the public sector fostering a market expansion, private sector investors are pouring money into the healthtech sector. See Sleeping HealthIT Giant Awakens with Massive Venture Investment Growth for more.
Dave Chase is the CEO of Avado.com, a Patient Relationship Management company. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice consulting to 25 hospitals and was the founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.
Categories: Uncategorized
I do apologize (a little) for the rant. Just in case anyone who reads this cares, there is a “big picture” consensus from my side of the canyon. And it is a canyon. The waters are violent for geeks in heath care but that is expected to change. It probably will not change before the government is totally running the show, though. What people don’t fully realize is that the government has been pretty much running healthcare since the 1960’s. They just haven’t been micro-managing in the strictest sense, which is what we are drawing closer to these days. The industry brought this on itself, for whatever excuse you choose, but that is the real conflict here, not EHRs. The geek world doesn’t really see old PEOPLE as the problem, but old THINKING and that usually happens to be embraced unequivocally by people who earned their highest degree before I was born (I’m 40). So until Hospital leadership figures out how to run a business you’re going to find it difficult to find IT professionals who really know what they’re doing and really care about the result of their work. In the meantime, you’re going to get people who really only care about the paycheck. And people like that do not do the kind of work that will bring us all to a happy place. I am not a doctor or a nurse but I care about the result of my work. No hospital has ever offered me a salary that compares to what I can make in other industries but I would have been very happy in health care if my work there really mattered. Almost every offere I’ve gotten from a hospital was not because they wanted me to be part of the plan to do excellent health care. They wanted me because they can’t keep IT workers. Like I said my fellow geeks out there, we aren’t invited…
I’m still recovering from my few long years in health care IT. I do believe it would have eventually killed me to stay in that business. Health care IT sucks for a lot of reasons but I figured out there was no reason for me to stay since I was never invited in the first place. This comment section and a simple google search will easily prove that. Hospitals, doctors, administrators…almost everyone in the business WANTS it to fail. Like spoiled children, they actually believe they will prove to the world that these fancy devil boxes called computers are just good for nothing if their stupid EHR or charting system isn’t efficient like a clay tablet and a stick. There really is a lot of stupid crap out there because development on health care systems is horrible. I used to love calling support on these expensive systems and some guy would answer and say “hello” like he was in his mother’s garage. Or the time the support guy couldn’t get his computer to work and I told him to reboot over the phone and even though that made it work he was still no help (big surprise). The scores of people roaming the hallways in hospitals aren’t programmers or engineers or nurses or doctors…they’re sales reps. Health care is totally unprepared for these snakes (just look at the comment section) and they pay through the nose for crap and then act like it’s my fault. Hospitals hire an engineer but everyone in the decision-making process is a doctor or a really old nurse. When the guy with the spray tan leaves and the trash his cousin developed last year doesn’t work, everyone looks at me and says “EHRs SUCK! HEALTH CARE IT SUCKS! WORK 70 HOURS FOR THE NEXT SIX MONTHS AND MAKE IT NOT SUCK! AND FIX MY PRINTER!” Hospitals think they can keep this up and prove to the government that guys like me can enable global data communications but we just aren’t good enough to replace a paper chart. Then they can go back to the racket that is health care in America. There are many reason people in health care want IT to fail but at the heart of it all is hubris; stubborn arrogant self-promoting pompous pride. I’m absolutely a free-market capitalist and I tell everyone I know that the government is NOT taking over health care. The health care industry is GIVING IT AWAY. They will choke on paper until the government finally steps in. When that happens and everyone wants to assign blame, I hate to say it but in this case it is your fellow American who let you down. They’ve been living the good life for over 60 years now, working collectively as the sloppiest, most undisciplined and unteachable collective I have ever witnessed, and getting paid on the backs of the sick and needy. You want to know why health care IT sucks? Because geeks laugh at guys like me who even thought to give it a try. It really IS a joke, but not because of the technology. It’s an industry run by unchecked greed and incompetence. Those who really do care and stay in the fight deserve way more credit than most could ever know. The rest of you can freaking choke on paper for all I care. PS the fact that docs like iPads does NOT mean they are open to working on computerized systems in a production environment. In fact it really makes it worse since they seem to want their computer to work like a home entertainment system. If you want your identity stolen, get sick. We have identified the fact that health care can’t figure out how to implement computerized systems, we haven’t come close to graduating to the severe security concerns that exist as a result of putting an ethernet connection in front of an elderly person who used to heal the common cold by blood-letting under candle light.
Do I seem bitter?
Crowdsourcing done right:
http://tinyurl.com/98cbqtq
“I should add that despite all the hoopla surrounding the networking of EMRs and the massive sums invested, patient records still can’t be exchanged electronically and the jury is still out regarding the viability of HIEs. Most importantly, the cost of care continues to climb and there’s little evidence that care is better or that patients are better off!”
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I am sympathetic to all of those arguments. But, there are so many moving targets in that scenario, attributing or implying cause or blame is problematic.
“Clearly, the EMR systems that have been out there for years haven’t worked”
And, just as clearly, that statement is demonstrably not true (which is not to claim that they are perfect).
And “midwestdoc” calls ME a “salesman.”
Look, I wish you and your project no ill. The market will decide in any event.
Bien dit. I like you Mr. Bushkin.
BobbyG, since we’ve not yet offered the MedKaz for sale commercially, your conclusion that it lacks traction is a bit premature. It brings to mind Mark Twain: “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
Regrettably, our crowdfunding effort didn’t succeed but that was because the site didn’t provide traffic for our kind of product. C’est la vie. We’ll know better next time!
It’s reactions from the likes of Midwest Doc and others like him, however, that support our belief that we’re on the right track. Clearly, the EMR systems that have been out there for years haven’t worked and a different approach is needed — one that meets the needs of providers and patients and is financially self sustaining.
I should add that despite all the hoopla surrounding the networking of EMRs and the massive sums invested, patient records still can’t be exchanged electronically and the jury is still out regarding the viability of HIEs. Most importantly, the cost of care continues to climb and there’s little evidence that care is better or that patients are better off!
You might want to check out the utter lack of traction it has gotten to date, “doctor.” Check out the “crowdsourcing” capital campaign results to date.
I’ll still be in business long after this idea has passed.
Well said.
Well played, sir!
I love it. I always wanted that. Then we would not be the burros of burden. Would put Bobby out of work. This is not a new idea. It is simple, cheap, and patient owned. Yet I think the dark side will prevail. The EHR requirements are not for us or our patients.
Good job. I wish you luck. I will pass this on.
Midwest doc says:
September 10, 2012 at 3:59 pm
I looked at your blog. You are a salesman.
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And you might actually be a doctor. Who knows?
I looked at your blog. You are a salesman.
“REC” – Regional Extension Center. C’mon, man. Click my name. Goes to my REC blog.
“My waiting room is full. I have no records, cannot eRX, do my Cs and Ms.”
Then, by definition, your risk analysis and mitigation plan (including disaster recovery/continuance of ops) was inadequate.
REC ?
I’m not selling anything. I’m REC.
Yes i did. Why do you want to sell me something?
Haven’t had time to review Stage 2 requirements but I’m confident the MedKaz will meet them as well.
Sounds like you didn’t establish a “disaster recovery” px as part of your HIPAA-required risk analysis and mitigation plan (45 CFR 164.308 et seq).
So, Merle, you’re saying MedKaz will be 2014 CEHRT verified as a “modular” product that will count for Meaningful Use Stage 2 both in the ambulatory and inpatient settings?
You’re far more accepting than I’d be!
Can’t help but note that if your patients each had a MedKaz with all their records on it — from you and their other docs, you wouldn’t miss a beat!
It’s hard to talk about something new without describing it. But when you do, it sounds like a sales pitch! 🙂
Re: MU requirements, you’re right. You have to meet 100% but that is a total which can be met via a combination of applications. Thus, for the doc who keeps paper and embraces the MedKaz free Patient Record Manager (PRM) (described on our site but not in my comments), they’re 80% of the way there. They can use other apps to achieve the remaining 20%.
This means that a doc can gradually transition to an EMR system. And when they do, they won’t have to incur the cost of scanning and digitizing their active patient records because they’ll already have been digitized when they are downloaded to the patient’s MedKaz and the doc’s PRM.
Good morning all. It is 9:25 am. My EMR is down. Something about the last software update needed for QR shut us down. My waiting room is full. I have no records, cannot eRX, do my Cs and Ms. But the sky is blue, mid seventies, and dry.
Interesting. I will have to study this. Nice way to leverage free ad space, I have to say.
One quibble. “80% of MU” = 0% of MU. While that aspect has its critics, it is the reality. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
See Dr. Rob’s and Ms. Gur-Airie’s posts below.
You’re missing the point of the discussion as I see it. HIT is not being designed to share data, it’s being designed to reinforce and promote all that is wrong with our current system: ICD/CPT driven bullet point medicine based on unequal access to care.
If we want to improve health care in this country, we’re going about it bass-ackwards. We’re designing HIT to preserve a broken system; we should be fixing the broken system first and the needed HIT will arise spontaneously.
Exactly, Rob. This is the crux.
Show me another “industry” where manufacturers are expected to booby trap their paying customers.
If we want to “transform” health care, or whatever, health IT should not be the means by which this is accomplished, any more than Boeing should be leveraged to transform the airline industry.
Make sure that the business of medicine does the right thing (like disappear) and the right IT will quickly follow. The other way around is ludicrous.
Sorry. I inadvertently hit Submit. To continue:
The patient:
* controls their records and who sees them
* knows their providers will have their complete record available at the point of care, in or out of their network
* knows their records are safe and secure (they’re not stored on the Internet)
* can participate in their care decisions.
We’ve tested the patented MedKaz with some 400 patients and their doctors and are starting to offer it commercially. It will be dispensed by physicians and HRC directly. Patients — for now — will pay for it and subscribe to our update service (down the road we expect employers, payers and government will pay for it). And HRC will pay an update fee to licensed providers (licensing is free).
We think the MedKaz will revolutionize healthcare IT. You can learn more about it on our web site, medkaz.com. I’d welcome your comments. E-mail me at mbushkin@medkaz.com.
The docs I talk to, this blog and its commenters all say the same thing. Doctors are facing four major business issues that threaten their ability to survive — and no one seems to be listening, least of all the legacy EMR vendors and the government!
* Their revenues are shrinking.
* They have too little time to spend with their patients.
* They are being forced to adopt medical record systems that cost too much and don’t work for them.
* Irrespective of how they keep records, they can’t easily coordinate the care they give their patients with their patients’ other providers.
There is a simple, easy to learn and use, affordable medical record system that solves these problems. It’s the MedKaz®, created by Health Record Corporation. In the interest of full disclosure, I am its Founder and CEO.
The MedKaz System turns today’s consensus-approach on its head. It is designed for patients and lives alongside whatever charting system a care provider uses, even paper. The beauty of it is that it benefits and meets the needs of everyone in the healthcare equation: providers, patients, employers, insurers and government!
The MedKaz is a distinctive flash drive that contains a patient’s complete medical record from all their providers. The patient owns and controls it and carries it on their key chain, in their wallet, or wears it. It is HIPAA compliant, encrypted, and password controlled. The patient gives it to their physician when they need care. The physician logs on, reads information waiting for them (which saves them time) and, as needed, electronically sorts and searches its contents to understand their patient’s health issues. They are paid to update it after each visit.
The provider:
* enjoys increased income (a typical PCP can earn $25K to $50K more per year)
* enjoys improved workflow that allows them more time to talk with their patient (or see more patients).
* doesn’t have to adopt an EMR system unless they want to (but it still enables them to meet 80% of Stage 1 MU requirements)
* finally can coordinate their patients’ care so they can avoid medical mistakes and ordering redundant or unnecessary tests.
The patient:
* controls their records and who sees them
* knows their providers will have their complete record available at the point of care, in or out of their network
* Knows their reords ar
As a user of EHR for 16 years (and one who is dumping this mess for a different model), I agree with the main point: most health IT sucks. The unfortunate reality, as one who has been awarded for “innovation” using IT, is that most of my innovation has been how to use IT to play the game faster so I have a little extra time for my patients on the side. Yet HIT, as Dave is trying to say, is not a transformative technology because it can’t break the rules of our system.
Epic is a perfect example of an extremely expensive (and expansive) system that can only be run by large health systems. These health systems are the very heart of what needs to be disrupted (where most of the money is spent, and where most of the old power lies), and they are now being put in charge of ACO’s and data management? Hospital systems are enormous businesses with large budgets that must be met. If they adopt IT it is for one reason: to increase their revenue (or at least maintain it). This disrupts nothing, supporting the system that causes cost to skyrocket.
No, doctors don’t see patients as vessels for e/m codes, but the business of medicine does, and that’s the main rub: the business of medicine wants to grow and consume more, while the “consumers” (known as patients) want to avoid care. Who does the current health IT system favor, the patient or the health system?
That is the crux.
without HIT, how are you planning on sharing data with PATIENTS, and having them share relevant data with YOU? just curious …
“Health IT is a free market that has failed”
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See JD Kleinke, “Dot-Gov: Market Failure And The Creation Of A National Health Information Technology System”
http://regionalextensioncenter.blogspot.com/2011/06/use-case.html
Until all EMRs can share information with each other seamlessly, they will be no more valuable than paper charts.
So why arent all EMRs sharing ifnormation? Because the business model for GE and Siemens and the handful of others who make these EMRs is NOT to share information — it is to capture market share by competing against other products and trying to show superiority. Thats harder to do when you are making your EMR open to communication with other platforms.
The EMR companies spend big money in Washington DC guaranteeing that there will never be a govt mandate to use one EMR, or even to force EMRs by law to have open communication with other EMR systems.
Health IT is a free market that has failed. Big government should force everybody to use one free, open system EMR. Vista/CPRS works for that purpose.
Margalit makes some good points – docs who have adopted EHRs are generally happy with them (or ~6/10 are). Fewer, however, are raving fans. Even fewer are able to tangibly demonstrate real triple aim impacts. And remember that the docs who have EHRs today include the docs who have had them for some time (the most mature). Expect new adopters to go through the “trough of dissillusionment” before they reach the “plateau of productivity” with associated levels of dissatisfaction.
There are two sides of HIMSS: the one that represents the people of health IT and the one that represents the corporate side of health IT (which Mitt Romney, of course, would also characterize as “people”), best exemplified by the EHRA or EHR Association. Needless to say, the latter pays the bills and keeps HIMSS afloat. And the former gives the facade of grassroots.
The foundation of discomfort with today’s (legacy) health IT is that it was (poorly) designed for fee-for-service optimization. Fee-for-service will more than likely remain the dominant way that healthcare is paid (and thereforce the dominant force driving strategic planning and leadership of healthcare organizations, care delivery, etc.).
It will take much more than disruptive technology for truly accountable (coordinated) care to take root, for truly patient-centered models of care to be commonplace, or for people to be able to make rational, informed health and financial/health decisions. The question is: Is HITECH enabling or slowing/preventing these from taking root?
Doc MS
With the endorsement of bulk sum in the operational methods to simply the workload and save time indirectly affects the patients to pay more for thier medical services.
It wasnt a put down. That;s what I am too at HIMSS
“Salesforce for 5 users (average small practice), costs the same.”
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And, what a piece of shit. ONC makes us use it.
Google OpenEMR.
http://regionalextensioncenter.blogspot.com/2012/07/analytics-sas-r-sql-ehr-database-schema.html
You utterly deserve all of your travail for not purchasing my Clinic Monkey EHR. You’re just on the wrong system.
http://ClinicMonkey.blogspot.com
Oh, and thanks for the put-down.
I think HIT and the bugs feeding on it should get a good dose of praziquantel.
We do not hate tech. we want it to work. In the present form it is an expensive exercise that will make venture leeches some money.
In the long run, when the pendulum beheads the parasites we can get back to work.
ACOs are another venture model. There is money to be made. They will fail the patient.
I agree with information sharing for better healthcare. A phone call, a fax, a working EHR, or a report should be a quality measurement. And that is it.
Before I start counting the ways, let me state very clearly that I have no financial or any other interest in either “legacy” EMRs or “innovative” theoretical EMRs, or parts thereof.
First of all I don’t know a single doctor, who believes that his/her patients are vessels for billing codes. Not one doctor. Of any specialty or circumstance. Nowhere.
Second, the “do more, bill more” system, by which I assume you mean fee for service, works lovely in France and Switzerland, so we’d better look somewhere else rather than “under the streetlight” in this case too.
Furthermore, all those reforms in reimbursements are driving consolidation and corporatiziuon of medicine, and corporations are way more greedy than individual physicians can ever be, and much better at it.
Third, concierge practices may be just fine for a few fortunate physicians and their equally fortunate patients, but they are not a solution for the blatant inequity that ails us.
Fourth, a recent Medscape physician survey found that 62% of docs are happy with their EMR. The last CDC survey found 85% satisfied or very satisfied with the same.
Fifth, EHRs cost a few hundred dollars per month, not a few thousands. Salesforce for 5 users (average small practice), costs the same. Siebel is “still” the #1 enterprise product in that market, because enterprises need more than a flimsy web page on an iPad to run their billions of dollars through.
Sixth, Epic MyChart is quickly becoming the de facto standard for patient portals and I suggest looking at some wonderful implementations like the one at Group Health and lots of others.
And speaking of Epic, they just announced connectivity to the surescripts clinical information network (beyond Rx) and every large institution has third party tools for mining their Epic databases. Check out Kaiser for one example.
I think we are beating on a horse that is not only dead, but really never existed in the first place.
The following observation was right on target. Finally a few people are willing to accept the truth.
“A common statement one hears in healthIT conversations is that doctors hate technology or are afraid of it. Hogwash. They only hate bad technology. Consider the iPad. Doctors are the biggest buyers and it’s not just young doctors…”
There is no question that EHR implementation has been a disaster. In our practice, we have succumbed, implemented a common national “certified” EHR system. Our costs have escalated. Our days are punctuated by frequent software glitches with inability to enter notes and/or inability to access data (NEVER happened in our office with paper records). New types of errors occur, and occur easily with the wrong keystrokes or software glitches, potential for greater danger than any manual errors I have made. In addition, we have had to increase our payroll by hiring an additional full time employee just to fulfill the meaningful use criteria (vitals, smoking data, colonoscopy or pap statuses, etc). Thank you to all the brilliant folks who have pressed this process. It is causing incalculable damage to our health system. For us, the care is less efficient, more expensive to provide, and demoralizing to caregivers who have always tried to do the job right.
It would be easy for someone reading this to say, “this doctor is a dinosaur”…but I am 47, I’ve used a PC all of my adult life, and I appreciate the power of technology and computers. In 10 years, perhaps these systems will be assets to patients and care. Unfortunately, the way HIT has been implemented/coerced in this country has caused serious damage to our healthcare system. This will become very evident in the coming years.
Hey guys, the VA’s VistA is free for the asking… see
http://moneyedpoliticians.net/2012/09/03/healthcare-costs-and-billing/
Dave’s is a thorough review of the current situation but, as Matt points out, looking to HIMMS is like searching for your keys under the streetlight when you’re pretty sure you dropped them in your dark back yard.
Payment reform, embodied as ACOs eager to get their hands on analytics and manage patients across the continuum of real-world cere, will scramble for better IT until the patients themselves become the center of health IT.
Aside from Microsoft, I don’t recall seeing ANY patient-centered IT at HIMSS in recent years.
If we want to stop “rampant overspending for no value,” it would be very easy to do without HIT.
If we want to perpetuate “rampant overspending for no value,” it will be very easy to do with HIT.
A better use than the previous 30 years of non-action on IT and rampant overspending for no value on everything else.
” getting the legacy vendors in, then having the customers figure out they need new stuff to replace it.”
Great use of health care bucks.
LOL. Right, Matthew. I’m a nobody, just a local REC grunt with a little off-hours blog. I was actually quite surprised at getting the press pass.
Re: Tim @histalk
A fair point. And, an old one (Dec 2008). Nonetheless, point taken.
I’m a Senior Member of ASQ. We, like a lot of these “Societies,” have ossified into an entity that principally churns out endless books, webinars, white papers, and pricey conferences.
I whacked my Society upside the head over their inattention to HIT issues recently on my blog:
http://regionalextensioncenter.blogspot.com/2012/08/stage-2-final-rule-and-2014-cehrt-final.html
and on LinkedIn and Twitter
That’s because you are very important press member. I suspect they will buy Bill Clinton breakfast too
I got comped. And got fed. 🙂
excellent observation – this is the mindset that needs to change
“A common statement one hears in healthIT conversations is that doctors hate technology or are afraid of it. Hogwash. They only hate bad technology. Consider the iPad. Doctors are the biggest buyers and it’s not just young doctors…”
And, by the way, I’ve been for HIMSS since 1994, and I am massively in favor of getting IT into health care any which way–including if necessary getting the legacy vendors in, then having the customers figure out they need new stuff to replace it. Right now they’re mostly replacing poor legacy with slightly better legacy (mostly Epic)
C’mon guys. Walk the floor and tell me where the money comes from…. (although it is a bit rich that they charge $1000 to get in and dont feed you!)
Of course if you listen to HIMSS it’s a “mission-driven non-profit”
But I think Tim @histalk tells it the way it is
http://labsoftnews.typepad.com/lab_soft_news/2008/12/himss-describes-itself-as-a-trade-association-in-press-release.html
Always happy when I can make a crusty Brit chuckle. I must have missed the memo about HIMSS being a trade assoc for *legacy* vendors. I was under the assumption they were the trade assoc for healthIT pros. Any startup should cheer HIMSS publishing a book on patient engagement. That’s an area legacy vendors have little experience. Thus it’s well suited to the sorts of companies one might see in SF in October.
Is there substantive evidence that HIMSS is essentially a shill for legacy HIT? I attended HIMSS12. I witnessed a LOT more than simply legacy HIT.
You were there too IIRC.
I’m having a quiet chuckle. Dave tells us how the legacy vendors cant do anything right and can’t reform themselves, then tells us he’s writing a book on behalf of the trade association of those legacy vendors….