By PHILIP ALLEN GREEN, MD

Sometimes when I am bored, when it is all sore throats and dental pains, when I feel more like I am a social worker and a hand-holder than an emergency medicine physician, I play a game.

I do not look at the chart before I go into a room. I walk in cold. I enter with no idea who is going to be in there or why. In that very first second, before anyone speaks, I try to guess what the story is, who the people in the room are, and why they are in my emergency room.

Here-maybe it would make more sense if I showed you.

I draw back the curtain and step into Trauma Room Two. My eyes scan quickly about, gathering as much information as they can.

There are three people in the room.

For a brief second, I intentionally do not look at the patient lying on the hospital bed, not yet. Two people accompany the patient, a man and a woman. The man sits on a hard plastic chair pushed back against the room’s wall, staring quietly ahead. I start with him. I know if I can just look closely enough, the story is there.

Continue reading…

By INTERSYSTEMS                                  SPONSORED CONTENT

How do you measure the ROI of a health information exchange? For Missouri Health Connection (MHC), the HIE serving Missouri and neighboring states, quantifying that elusive ROI for its participants is now a priority.

If you’re going to the CHIME15 Fall CIO Forum, you can see firsthand the work of our client, Mark Pasquale, President and CEO of MHC.

He has been in the HIE trenches and knows that calculating ROI is critical to winning new participants and physician adoption.  After investing government dollars to create infrastructure and services, HIEs must now demonstrate their value to participants. In this regard, MHC is taking a lead. Pasquale developed a spreadsheet calculator, based on metrics for healthcare costs that an HIE can prevent – numbers he drew from published studies.Continue reading…

By SUSAN DENTZER

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has,” goes the quotation usually attributed to the late anthropologist Margaret Mead. Today, huddled around conference tablesand hatching ambitious plans, relatively small groups of committed leaders are trying to improve health and transform health care in their communities.

Consider these examples:

• In California, Live Well San Diegois attacking a tidal wave of chronic diseases and rising costs, and is halfway through a 10-year plan to improve the health and well-being of county residents. More than 100 partnering organizations, including the county health department, are working to halt tobacco use, increase healthy eating, improve access to quality health care, and even make the area more resilient in the event of natural disasters or other emergencies.

• In Georgia, the Atlanta Regional Collaborative for Health Improvementhas brought together local government officials, philanthropies, health care systems, public health authorities, and others to chart a strategy that could lead to lasting improvements in the community’s health. ARCHI aims to improve quality and save money in health care, and reinvest those savings to raise local citizens’ education and incomes, which are fundamental determinants of community health.

• In Colorado, the Pueblo Triple Aim Corporation, a nonprofit organization, has worked for the past five years to make Pueblo County the state’s healthiest based on theircounty health ranking(Pueblo ranked among the bottom 5 of the state’s 64 counties when the effort began). The local health department, hospitals, federally qualified health centers, the Pueblo Latino Chamber of Commerce, and other organizations have banded together to fight obesity and unintended pregnancy, and deter unnecessary emergency department use and avoidable hospital readmissions.

• In Minnesota, Hearts Beat Back: The Heart of New Ulm Project is working to create “a world without heart disease,” starting in the rural communities of New Ulm (population 13,500), Springfield (pop. 2,215) and Sleepy Eye (pop. 3,600). Beginning in 2009, this collaboration of The Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation and two local health systems launched several initiatives to reduce heart attacks and heart disease. For example,with more than two-thirds of local adults overweight or obese, they launched a media campaign thataims to persuade people to “swap it to drop it” – that is, to exchange sugary sodas for water when shopping in local grocery or convenience stores.

Continue reading…

By JOE V. SELBY, MD

A basic rule of scientific discovery is that the answers you get are only as good as the questions you ask.

That is certainly the case in health care. Traditionally, it has been the sole responsibility of health researchers to develop questions for study that, when answered, can provide reliable and relevant information for patients and clinicians. For the most part, they’ve done an exceptional job, as evidenced by countless discoveries about the nature of disease and remarkable advances in diagnosing, preventing and treating them. But when researchers are the only ones determining scientific inquiry, other critical perspectives can be missed – most notably, the practical, frequent questions asked by patients, caregivers and clinicians about the best choice among two or more for options that are available.

But what if we tried something different – still soliciting the best ideas for studies from the research community but focusing on questions most important to patients, their families, clinicians and other healthcare stakeholders not traditionally involved in the research process? What if we then brought those same stakeholders, plus top scientists, into the room where proposals to study those questions are judged? What if we also sought to make them partners on the research teams that design and conduct the studies and help get the word out on results that could improve care and outcomes?

Continue reading…