Just a little over four years ago, President Obama, in his inaugural address, challenged us as a nation to “wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its costs.” This was an awe-inspiring, “we will go to the moon” moment for the healthcare delivery system. But the next thought that ran through the minds of so many of us who work on health IT issues was this: how were we going to get there?
We were essentially starting from scratch. Less than 1 in 10 hospitals had an electronic health record, and for ambulatory care physicians, the numbers weren’t much better – about 1 in 6 had an EHR. Hospitals and physicians reported an array of challenges that were holding them back. No nation our size with a healthcare system as complex as ours had even come close to universal EHR use. Yet, the President was calling for this by just 2014.
And it was clear why. The promise of EHRs was enormous and we knew that paper-based records were a disaster. They lead to lots of errors and a lot of waste. I have cared for patients using paper-based records and using electronic records – and I’m a much better clinician when I’m using an EHR. In the weeks that followed Obama’s inaugural address, the U.S. Congress passed, and the President signed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, which contained a series of incentives and tools to drive adoption and “meaningful use” of EHRs. None of us knew whether the policy tools just handed to the Obama administration were going to be enough to climb the mountain to universal EHR use. We were starting at sea level and had a long climb ahead.
On Tuesday, just about 4 years after the passage of HITECH, Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation held a briefing about where we as a nation are vis-à-vis health information technology. Mike Painter, who is the RWJF lead, captured it perfectly in his reflection that when you climb a mountain, it’s important to take breaks, celebrate the progress, and enjoy the vistas. July 9 in Washington DC was just such a moment. It was a day to celebrate how much progress we have made. No “Mission Accomplished” banners. Just a day to take a breath and say – we are off to a very strong start.
Why do I say this? In 2008, 9% of U.S. hospitals had at least a basic EHR. In 2012? That number is 44%. A staggering near 5X increase in 4 years. And the gains on the ambulatory care side have also been impressive. What’s more, the numbers suggest that HITECH led to an inflection point – it catalyzed the adoption of EHRs across U.S. hospitals. This is the proportion of U.S. hospitals with at least a basic EHR:
Beyond EHR adoption, the story gets a little less joyous. A key part of using EHRs to improve healthcare delivery is clinical data exchange – getting physicians, hospitals, other providers to electronically share clinical data with each other. There are lots of paths to achieving this goal – but the one that has had the greatest policy attention has been through entities called Health Information Exchanges or HIEs. These entities have sprung up around the country and many of them are getting funds through HITECH (passed on through states) to help ensure that data can follow patients as they go from one clinical setting to another. At the Health Affairs briefing, we heard from Julia Adler-Milstein anupdate on how these HIEs are doing. The good news is that they are growing by leaps and bounds. We’ve been surveying these entities for more than 7 years now – and between 2010 and 2012, there was a 60% increase in the number of HIEs that are actively exchanging clinical data (119 in 2012 compared to 75 in 2010). Nearly 30% of U.S. hospitals are exchanging clinical data with non-affiliated providers using these HIEs (a doubling from 2010) and approximately 10% of ambulatory care practices in the U.S. are exchanging clinical data using these HIEs (a threefold increase from 2010). While the gains are important – the data also point to the long road ahead. Most physicians and hospitals are not exchanging clinical data using HIEs. A bigger issue that the Adler-Milstein paper raises is this: Most HIEs are not financially sustainable now (they are largely dependent on grants, etc.) and 3 in 4 report that finding a sustainable business model is a challenge. There is substantial risk that as the HITECH funding runs out – many of these HIEs will go under unless the doctors and hospitals that are using them are willing to pay for it.
Two other big challenges that lie ahead are worth discussing. First, there is a large proportion of healthcare providers that are left out of HITECH. Who is left out? Nursing homes, rehab hospitals, mental health providers and facilities, etc. It’s a big problem. If you think about high cost patients– and the kinds of care they need – they spend a lot of time in these facilities and with these ineligible providers. The best data we have suggests that these providers who are ineligible for financial incentives have abysmally low levels of EHR use. No one is even tracking how these guys are doing. And, without a concerted effort, we are unlikely to get them on board with electronic records. So, we will end up with large parts of the healthcare system that are digitized — and large parts that are not. While it’s easy to blame HITECH for not including these providers, as the bill was being crafted, choices had to be made. Policymakers made the decision to take the money they had and focus it on ambulatory care providers (docs, nurse practitioners, etc.) and acute-care hospitals. However, we have to figure out a strategy to get these other key providers on board.
The second challenge is the key to the kingdom: figuring out how to use Health IT more effectively. As I’ve written before, Health IT is not magic pixie dust. You don’t spread some into the healthcare system and see gains in quality or efficiency. In fact, in most industries, IT has taken years, often decades to exert its effects. I am confident that if we do nothing, health IT will have huge effects on healthcare delivery – but it might take a decade or two. We need to figure out how to speed up the process. In other industries, IT has been a source of creative destruction: it has changed the way people work, destroyed a lot of jobs and created brand new ones. We aren’t seeing much of that in healthcare yet. In a terrific paper that Julia Adler-Milstein published last year (I was a co-author – but the idea was completely hers), she found that on average, doctors weren’t any more productive or efficient if they used an EHR. However, if these doctors had nurse practitioners or other advanced non-physician providers in their practice, EHR use was associated with much higher likelihood of being a high performer. If doctors did not have these advanced practitioners, EHRs tended to be associated with lower likelihood of being a high performer. It’s exactly this kind of insight that we need to better understand how to use EHRs to make care better. EHRs are best when they change the way we deliver care. Half of the physicians in the U.S. may now being using an EHR – but most have not used the EHR to change the way they work. Until they do, we should not expect to see big gains in quality or efficiency from the EHR.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation 2012 report on the state of health information technology in the U.S. is an essential read to understand where we are on health IT adoption and use – and this year’s report tells us that we are making a lot of progress. HITECH is having an important impact on the healthcare marketplace. However, the President, in his inaugural address, did not say that we will use taxpayer dollars to help doctors and hospital buy technology. This is not a technology program. He said that we will use technology to “raise healthcare quality and lower its costs”. If that is the goal – if that is the moon that we have to reach – then we should celebrate the accomplishments to date – but, at the same time, remember that our work is just getting started.
Ashish Jha, MD, MPH is the C. Boyden Gray Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He blogs at An Ounce of Evidence. He is also the Senior Editor-in-Chief for Healthcare: The Journal of Delivery Science and Innovation.
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Le diste en el clavo en la cabeza de mi amigo! Algunas personas simplemente no lo entiendo!
MM, I don’t really know what you mean by your comment. I was simply trying to provide a practical image of the doctors life in the 1970’s compared to today.
Al: I didn’t create that image. But feel free to filer all the posts and replies, and all events past, present or future, through your own preconceptions.
MM: “Lockheed offered an electronic medical record, as did others, in the early 1970s.”
You create an interesting and humorous image. A 1970’s doctor lugging around a huge computer in one hand and a stethoscope in the other. I think the i-pad and its smaller cousins along with wi-fi may very well be one of the major stimuli to electronic record keeping, but will continued government pressure to create a single system that meets government needs, not the physician’s and patient’s, inhibit development?
John: You’re one of my favorite medical HIT guys, but with all due respect, your historical analogy is not correct on HIT.
I’ve done the first-hand research. In the mid-1950s, there were computerized clinical decision support systems. Lockheed offered an electronic medical record, as did others, in the early 1970s. This isn’t the AT&T picture phone, which the market didn’t want for various reasons. This was physicians rejecting computerization and a marketplace that deferred to physician preferences, having no mechanisms whatsoever to reward economic efficiency or quality of care. And so, computerization for clinical purposes lagged; for billing, it flourished.
It is not “cars that fly;” it is marketplace issues. My original point was that non-profit hospitals implicitly tell us they will do whatever it takes to keep patients safe and get us well, not only those steps that don’t make the medical staff angry or bring in extra donations. (See Chapter 4 of my book, “Demanding Medical Excellence,” thoroughly footnoted.)
The HITECH Act used federal grants to override the lack of market incentives to adopt a technology, that, ultimately, would be good for the federal government as the largest payer.
Encrypted computers is an example of, “We’ve decided to adopt technology, how do we do it right?” That involves, certainly, issues of adoption speed, scope, etc. that are all legitimate. But the actual decision to embrace computerization was a genuine paradigm switch. As Thomas Kuhn famously wrote, that doesn’t happen even with scientists just because of evidence (as they like to think about themselves), but because the “trauma” of the old ways not working can’t be avoided.
In other words, when computers became ubiquitous, and new generations of doctors came of age, medicine adopted them. You’ve been a leader in this area, and more power to you for celebrating successes and looking forward. Me, I don’t think “2008” (before HITECH) is ancient history, so I think learning the lessons of what has happened in the past can help those successes in the future come about.
Michael
Of my 1330 BIDMC procured laptops, 1327 are encrypted. The 3 remaining are grant funded and belong to people who are on leave and are not responding to the encryption mandate. I’ve deactivated the enterprise credentials for these 3 people so no one can login to the three unencrypted laptops.
Some may say – wow, you’ve encrypted all the clinical and grant funded laptops procured over the past several years. That’s great. Others may say, 3 laptops are unencrypted, how could you let that happen?
I’ve heard the same kind of perspectives when discussing EHR and HIE adoption in the US. We have increased EHR use in hospitals from 9% to 44% in 5 years. The majority of ambulatory clinicians are now using EHRs. HIE transaction volume has risen significantly over the past 2 years. The standards for content, vocabulary, and transport of care transition data are well described and codified in regulation.
Yet, there are those who will focus on the hospitals still using paper, the ambulatory clinicians still in implementation, or the HIEs which have not yet achieved sustainability.
In the 1950s, Popular Mechanics promised me flying cars by the year 2000. I’m driving a Prius. It doesn’t fly, but it does get 65 miles to the gallon. It’s safer and more comfortable than the cars of 1950’s. It’s the best car I’ve ever owned. I’m not berating the auto industry for the lack of flying cars in 2013, but I am enjoying the incremental innovation which has happened over the past few decades.
Of course we should be impatient about EHRs and HIEs. My 20 year old daughter should never experience medical care without an EHR. My wife should never experience redundant or unnecessary testing for lack of healthcare information exchange. Yet, we’ve done more for EHRs and HIEs in the past 5 years than in the previous 200. I hope that policymakers evaluate the success of HITECH through the lens of phased progress. Let’s keep the momentum going, motivated by the joy of success, rather than the fear of failure.
You state “I have cared for patients using paper-based records and using electronic records – and I’m a much better clinician when I’m using an EHR.”
And how many patients do you manage, exactly?
Doubt very many since I never saw this on the internet on a doctor:
“Is Dr. Jha accepting new patients?
If you are a new patient, please check with Dr. Jha before scheduling an appointment.”
Additionally, the RWJ report is folly since it failed to address thebfailure of these devices to improve outcomes or reduce costs. And how about listing the adverse events, near misses, and deaths conveniently ignored, except by nurses as reported here:
http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/entry/rns-say-sutters-new-electronic-system-causing-serious-disruptions-to-safe-p/
It seems to me that it is in our best interests to focus on the future of health IT rather than its past. Certainly, how past government regulations have affected the abilities of clinicians and entrepreneurs with respect to Health IT should be discussed, but mostly as a guide for what role the government should play in the future.
With that said, and adhering to the broad strictures by which the current Health IT space operates, I’m curious if anyone would disagree with the following:
*Interoperability of enterprise EHR systems is a crucial component of successful Health IT use – for patients and clinicians
*Health Information Exchanges are currently one of the most promising vehicles by which health information can be brought from one provider to the next – and from all providers to patients
*Making the Health IT system work for patients and providers requires input from patients, providers, regulators, and enterprise system representatives, among others
*The government has the capability to incent innovation in Health IT, and, given its skin in the game, also has an interest in spurring innovations in Health IT that hold the promise of reducing healthcare spend and increasing patient satisfaction
If everyone agrees (and please let me know if you don’t!), then it seems like a path forward which could plausibly take the increase in adoption of Health IT and turn it into an increase in Health IT efficacy (for patients and providers) is for the government to offer a prize, or prizes, for innovations in the HIE space.
If that sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s not that far away from what recently happened with the Blue Button Co-Design Challenge.
Future contests may hold the promise of spurring innovative ideas and catalyzing novel uses of technology to help make Health IT work for patients and providers.
“It’s a problem with providers – that they have little appetite to share data.”
What planet are you describing here? It’s certainly not one that I’ve visited during my medical career.
@Ashish: “Its a problem with providers — that they have little appetite to share date.”
Physicians share information all the time. In fact one should take note of the concierge physicians that are providing patient records directly to the patient in the form of a CD or perhaps a memory stick.
By the way when I hear that the IRS released social security numbers and that supposedly closed records have likely been violated for political reasons I wonder how safe our personal health care records will be in the hands of experts and the government.
@Adrian: “We need patient-centered accountable care with physicians as the patient’s agent not the institution’s EHR data entry clerk.”
I remember fax machines when they were rather expensive and can’t remember a government agency providing incentive payments to physicians or hospitals so that they purchase the machines. I also don’t recall too many physicians that didn’t have fax machines available in a relatively short time frame.
Thank you for your clear cut information.
Thanks, Adrian. I always learn from your deep knowledge of the industry. Michael
Dr. Pullen — thanks for your thoughtful note. Getting health information exchange to happen has been very hard — and our latest paper (referenced above) shows in stark detail how slow moving it is.
I said at the briefing that this is not a technology problem. Its also not, I don’t think, ultimately a vendor problem. Its a problem with providers — that they have little appetite to share date. Until we change the healthcare business model, it’ll be hard to make a business case for doing the right thing: sharing patients’ data with them and with other providers who care for them.
Terrific comment. Thank you.
Our small private family medicine group was on the bleeding edge of EHR, in 1997 “going live” and so 16 years into it we have a robust system internally, but still struggle to connect to much of anyone outside our lab and our patients externally. Hospital interface? Heck no, they treat their info like propriatary secrets. It’s frustrating that all the vendors are not mandated to become accessible to each other. That would be healthcare reform.
To your points:
1. Agreed
2. Agreed, but let’s make an important distinction between the abstract concept of EHR and the formal definition of EHR as government (ONC) sees it, as well as what you might call Observed EHR (what’s available today or is likely to be developed soon).
3. Good point, though I remember a discussion around the time HITECH was being passed or soon thereafter, where the main reason for slow adoption was said to be bad usability. Doctors were rightly complaining about having to work for the software, rather than the other way around. It was an engineer-oriented and data-oriented system, rather than a user-oriented, outcome-oriented one.
4. MU is effectively a means to pick winners and losers. It says which vendors get the money at the end of the day (winners) and which ones don’t. Unfortunately, the winners based on MU1 have been vendors who can make the same systems that have been out there for years, meaning the Big Boys could get bigger (Cerner stock, for example, has grown about five-fold since HITECH was passed), effectively making those hundreds of other companies nothing more than placeholders until they get bought out. To certify for MU1, your system didn’t have to be interoperable, didn’t have to help measure outcomes, didn’t have to make data input easy and accurate, etc. etc. God forbid we ask existing EHR vendors to add features to their 1970s-style products!
“Paper is a terrible way to deliver healthcare”
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” ___Winston Churchill.
Same with paper. But until the EHR is made to improve healthcare rather than billing, research, political payoff, etc. it will remain in its infancy. That means the experts and government have to leave the immediate scene. As I stated earlier, I am one of the early users that wished to go a lot further and actually had the knowledge at hand to do so.
“EHR adoption rates were abysmally low”
Who caused that? Remember the Stark Laws? Do you know what those laws said when physicians wanted to integrate their systems with their suppliers?
” I think, found middle ground between being too interventionistic and being completely laissez-faire.”
Since you have been alive you have never seen laissez-faire in health care. In fact government intervention has prevailed as long as anyone under the age of ~70 has been around. Let us be a little more thoughtful when creating new middle ground.
Develop the EHR from ground up. No major intervention for this development was ever needed by health care professionals. All they needed was for government along with their experts to get out of the way.
Michael, HITECH accelerated vendor lock-in through the introduction of Certification and CCHIT.
The micromanagement of technology, even when justified to fix a market failure, is a risky strategy when software and connectivity are advancing faster than Moore’s law. Strict certification requirements eliminated a lot of the incentive for innovation, pushed start-ups out of the race and are completely incompatible with community supported open source software.
Worst of all, strict technology certification requirements do not reward improvements in usability and user experience. This has soured a huge number of physicians on health IT and will take years to undo.
But all of that is history. My concern is fixing the market failure that we’re all talking about. Vendor lock-in as a business model now stands squarely in the way of providing free bi-directional interfaces for data to follow the patient. Allowing free and fully potent interfaces effectively negates the vendor lock-in business model because upgrades and innovation can be purchased from anyone. It also forces institutions to actually compete on the basis of quality and cost because patients can actually walk. To remedy this, HHS now has to scramble to micromanage health information exchange technology and the privacy issues that the EHR vendors and institutions now say are so very, very difficult.
Blue Button Plus is a very good start but it’s not part of stage 2 and so adoption by the vendors and dataholders is voluntary. Patient Privacy Rights is working as hard as we can to make Blue Button Plus the foundation for effective health information exchange. Unfortunately, most of the HIE money is still going to unsustainable institution-to-institution HIE strategies that bypass the patient and the physician.
HIE is unsustainable because of the EHR vendor lock-in and integrated delivery institution lock-in model of “accountable” care. We need patient-centered accountable care with physicians as the patient’s agent not the institution’s EHR data entry clerk.
Great discussion guys. I have to say that I find it baffling to think that government has been stopping EHRs from developing.
I think the following are some evidence-based facts:
1. Paper is a terrible way to deliver healthcare
2. EHRs have lots of potential problems (including cut-paste) but when used well, they can lead to much better care.
3. Left to itself, we saw that EHR adoption rates were abysmally low and the reason why (based on national surveys of physicians and hospitals) was simple: they had to foot the bill and payers and patients got the benefits.
4. The intervention by CMS into the marketplace has not been perfect (nothing ever is) but they have, I think, found middle ground between being too interventionistic and being completely laissez-faire. There are over a thousand products that have been certified by ONC. Its hardly like they are picking the winners and losers. The federal government is not designing the EHRs.
So — if we can agree on the facts — lets talk about what to do better. Saying that paper-based records are awesome or that the healthcare marketplace was doing great at spurring EHR adoption on its own are just not consistent with the data.
MM, I know from experience what I wanted to do and what I was permitted to do by our government. If it weren’t for the Stark Laws and a few others I believe we would have an integrated EHR system today. You talk about doctor culture, but no sooner than doctors convert to laparoscopic surgery they are changing to robotics. Health IT as we are seeing it develop does not save lives. It costs money and likely costs lives in the trade offs.
If you wish to improve quality you have to increase transparency and change the incentives. If that is done and it means reduced government interference we will have appropriate EHR’s very quickly. We should have had some type of EHR in the 1980’s, but as I have said over and over again the experts and the government interfered.
MM writes: “Last note: most of the doctors who resisted health information technology did so because in THEIR experience, THEY didn’t need any help from a computer.”
Bull. Doctors have been technologically minded when it was suitable. Look at all the healthcare developments and look at how fast surgical procedures change.
In my opinion if telephone technology depended upon government intervention a portable phone would weight 200 pounds and have several miles of wire.
Al, medical records have been developing “from the bottom up” for decades. IBM offered it in 1965, Lockheed in the 1970s, etc. The problem was not the technology, it was doctor culture. “We don’t need computers.”
The patients who died because doctors resisted health IT are not, alas, here to post their opinion. The data about CPOE adoption not happening because of evidence, only because of incentives, is also clear, and that’s from 1993-2008.
Dead airline passengers are a lot more visible than dead patients, yet the heavy hand of government got us flame resistant fabrics, seats that don’t tear off, etc. The flaws in “cut-and-paste” medical records and all the rest are real. So is the other side of the ledger.
Michael M “Paper kills.” It’s just that no alternative is perfect.”
Right and even EHR’s kill so why don’t we get smart and let medical records develop from the bottom up instead of the top down? Why don’t we move government a little bit towards the background so nature takes its course. The first time I tried to do exactly what the government wishes to do today I was prevented by government rules and regulations. That was in the 80’s.
By the way have you not noted the canned reports and inaccurate data that is copied from one EHR to the next?
It’s true, Ashish, “bribery” is a far harsher term than “fixing a market failure.” Seriously: I don’t expect the health care industry to incur costs and implement a technology that is difficult to do right merely because the evidence says it is good for patients. But, the thing is, most patients do, and that’s the myth of professional obligation physicians encourage. I use the word “bribe” to be provocative, but, as a Chicagoan, I must say we have lots of politicians who believe in “fixing market failures.” Or, “Money talks, market failures walk.”
Last note: most of the doctors who resisted health information technology did so because in THEIR experience, THEY didn’t need any help from a computer. The motives were pure and the belief was sincere. Wrong, and hurtful to patients, but sincere.
Michael — excellent points as usual. Two thoughts:
1. Is it really shocking that the healthcare industry is not persuaded by data on quality and safety? At the end of the day, we have an industry where doing going and doing well are often at odds with each other. You say bribing (and I get why) — and I say, its an effort by the biggest payer in the marketplace (CMS) to fix a market failure.
2. Agree regarding errors from EHRs — I was on the IOM panel that studied EHRs and patient safety. There is no doubt that EHRs can cause errors. The only problem is that we know that paper-based care is rife with errors. So, we have to transition out of paper into electronic records. We just have to figure out how to do it as safely as possible.
Oh, and HIT will have actually delivered fully on its promise when, along with health data, it delivers PRICE DATA. Again: I live in hope …
Thanks, Ashish. ONC (given its by-nature bureaucratic portfolio) is actually doing an OK job at picking up the clues that patients can be of meaningful use in and of themselves when it comes to reforming healthcare.
The HIT issue, IMO at least, is the entrenched thinking on the part of the vendors who sell to big health systems. Their lock-in approach, where opening a pipe between providers costs said providers big bucks each and every time, is partying like it’s 1975.
The third-party folks you mention are crying out for APIs. So far, no soap from the big players. I live in hope … but then, I’m a patient. That’s SOP for us: living in hope.
ET — a key point I made was that the real value of health IT comes when it begins to move the needle on costs and quality. It won’t happen easily or quickly — and we have to find ways to speed up the process. Not sure that we’ve been thinking about EHRs and how they should be used for 200 years — my sense is that as a nation, we’ve only gotten serious about them over the last five years or so.
MC — terrific point and I did not choose to ignore patients willfully. I think giving patients real access to their data in electronic format, for free, in a timely manner, is critical. I made the point about a year ago that I was surprised (pleasantly) that ONC was making this a key part of Meaningful Use (http://blogs.sph.harvard.edu/ashish-jha/2012/08/).
They did — and now, part of meeting Stage 2 MU is that you have to actually show that your patients are downloading or using the data. I think this is critical.
The most interesting stuff will come when we have third party folks (app developers, etc.) figure out what to do with all that electronic data to really engage patients in their own care.
Adrian,
I think the steroid analogy is well placed for HITECH. The apparent reduction in inflammation seen with codifying clinical information for analysis and billing has resulted in an the atrophy of real meaning in clinical notes (templated gibberish), degenerative disorders in inter-physician communication (automated junk referral letters, poor data exchange), edema for the bill (over coding), and a catabolic effect on patient-centric efforts (apps, open data).
MU is like adding a second drug to mitigate the flawed effects the first injection caused. Unfortunately, vendor lock-in from HITECH has made it very difficult to un-do the lasting effects of the first injection of cash.
Ashish:
Good post. In terms of the use of health IT technology by others than doctor offices or hospitals, the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluating of HHS has a report on that issue coming out soon. (It was mandated in HITECH.) Stay tuned.
As I noted earlier in a blog here (THCB) a few months ago, bribing doctors and hospitals to adopt technology worked when evidence failed. LDS Hospital showed it could reduce adverse drug events with CPOE to a bare minimum back in 1993, but CPOE adoption was just 27 percent in 2008 versus 72 percent in 2012. Money talks, no one walks.
As for the cost of EHRs and that they can cause errors: sure. So they weren’t a panacea. You mean, when Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich and all the vendors agreed that they were, you believed them? The key question is: compared to what? Paper? Newt, bless him, was right: “Paper kills.” It’s just that no alternative is perfect.
Meanwhile, Adrian, I disagree with you about the side effect between “vendor lock-in” and the like. As you well know, all of that existed before HITECH. The spread of technology made the onerous consequences more obvious and perhaps more important. You may blame HITECH for not solving lock-in, etc., but I don’t believe it created it.
We are now learning that EHR’s also offer errors and we are finding that costs of EHR’s that were never expected. I don’t think many are against EHR’s rather many are against the top down approach which in my opinion is a failure.
I say that even though in the early 1980’s I voluntarily was placing the important features of my notes and treatment along with laboratory on a computer that could have been linked to others.
What mucked up this type of development was experts that didn’t know the reasons behind the physicians notes and the government regulation that interfered with all sorts of entities linking up. I don’t want to hear what Obama or any other politician of any party had to say. Those are the guys that mucked things up in the first place.
HITECH is a great success, if you measure success as Dr. Jha does here: the percentage of hospitals in the US who had managed to spend billions in “free” taxpayer money to buy poorly designed systems, to run within a misaligned data framework.
The true measure of success is not in inputs (money spent, systems installed) but in output: rising quality of care, more efficient use of resources (especially doctors’ time), better overall outcomes for communities, etc.
“I am confident that if we do nothing, health IT will have huge effects on healthcare delivery – but it might take a decade or two” — Sadly, even given 200 years the current concept of what EHRs should be (formalized by HITECH’s MU criteria) is simply not geared toward collecting, assessing or improving any of these metrics. It’s mostly about serving the good old empire of red tape, whose masters are neither doctors nor patients.
The visible and exciting progress that has been made has also had some side-effects. HITECH is like a steroid injection – it definitely takes care of the inflammation symptom but it may have severe side and long-term effects and may be doing little to cure the disease.
Four years in, HITECH has done brilliantly to reduce the lack of EHR symptom but the side-effect has been massive consolidation and vendor lock-in by the EHR industry without much portability and no visible gains in transparency of either quality or cost. The vendor lock-in, in particular, has tremendous and long lasting cost implications and also works to increase the opportunity cost of truly effective health information exchange.
If our goal is the Triple Aim, and the ACA is designed around a strategy of patient choice, portability and transparency of cost and quality, then the incentives have to move away from trying to regulate and micromanage locked-in technology and in a direction that enables meaningful competition for health IT.
Data liberation is the essential lifeblood of Independent, market driven health IT. Patient directed exchange like the Blue Button Plus program (including unencumbered support for privacy, innovative apps and open source software business models) will allow patient-centered outcomes measurement and enable the portability and patient mobility that will make the ACA strategy work.
You used the word “patients” exactly three times – none of them in the context of how EHR tech allows *them* access to their own health data. Which it doesn’t, yet.
I understand that the system-level issues with health data and exchange of same are massive. I get that info-sec at the levels required by HIPAA and HITECH ain’t simple. However, as long as all the experts are talking over patients’ heads, and hypnotized by the Big Iron vendors and their locked-in code … health IT will continue to cost a bomb and deliver not-enough.
Giving patients access – and not just “here, print out this PDF” – to their data, allowing them to share their own input from devices like Fitbit, and actively interact with their goals, will finally kill the silos. We ain’t even close to “there yet” …