Category: Uncategorized

Learning From Our Interoperability Failures

Apr 3, 2015• 14

By FRED TROTTER

Currently, when healthcare data moves in this country it does it using fax machines and patient sneaker-nets. Automated digital interoperability is still in its earliest stages, mostly it has a history of being actively resisted by both the EHR vendors and large healthcare providers. We, as an industry, should be doing better, and our failure to do so is felt everyday by patients across the country.

The ONC-defined difference between EHRs and EMRs is that EHRs are interoperable. Yet, as I have said before, we have spent almost a billions of dollars and generally gotten EMRs instead of EHRs.

Comments were due Apr 3 for the ONC Interoperability Roadmap for 2015-2020. This was specifically separated out from the overall ONC Health IT Strategic Plan for which comments have closed.

Both of these plans ignore the lessons in execution from the previous strategic plan for health IT from ONC. The current Interoperability Roadmap mentions the “NwHIN” (Nationwide Health Information Network) for instance, and only covers what it accomplished, which are mostly policy successes like the DURSA (Data Use and Reciprocal Support Agreement). NwHIN was supposed to be a network of networks that connected every provider in the country… why hasn’t that happened?

ONC has forgotten what the actual ambition was in 2010. It was not to create cool policy documents. The plan 5 years ago was to have the “interoperability problem” solved in 5 years. The plan 5 years before that was probably to solve the problem in 5 years. Apparently, our policy makers look at interoperability and say “wow this is a big problem, we need at least 5 years to solve it”. Without any sense of ironic awareness that this is what they have been saying for decades, even before Kolodner was the ONC.

A Business Proposal for Mark Cuban

Apr 3, 2015• 11

By SAURABH JHA, MD

Businessman and maverick, Mark Cuban recently opined “if you can afford to have your blood tested for everything available, do it quarterly so you have a baseline of your own personal health.” I’m unsure why he said quarterly, not weekly, daily or hourly. ‘

He further opined that this must be done to “create your own personal health profile and history. It will help you and create a base of knowledge for your children, their children, etc.” I assume etc. refers to grandchildren’s children.

I’m unclear what my grandchildren would gain from knowing my serum free testosterone levels in 2014. That’s a lot of data to enter in ancestry.com. For that matter, the size of my grandfather’s spleen in 1956 probably doesn’t affect the way I think about my mortality. That year he had a bout of Leishmaniasis, which, thankfully, isn’t a problem in Philadelphia.

Cuban further explained “a big failing of medicine = we wait till we are sick to have our blood tested and compare the results to “comparable demographics.”

An Epic Struggle for the Soul of Medicine

Apr 1, 2015• 32

By MARTIN SAMUELS, MD

This week I attended an all day “training” session in a new medical record system. I thought it was interesting that the experience was called “training,” which prompted me to remind myself of a few useful definitions.

Education, from the Latin root meaning a drawing forth, implies not so much the communication of knowledge as the discipline of the intellect; an intra-cerebral process aimed in large part at creating principles upon which new knowledge may be elaborated. Instruction is that part of education that furnishes the mind with knowledge. Teaching is often applied to practice as in “teaching a dog to do tricks.”

Training is an element of education in which the chief characteristic is exercise or practice for the purpose of imparting facility, as in “training for the marathon.” Breeding relates to manners and outward conduct as in “standing when elders enter a room is a sign of good breeding.” Regimentation is the prescription of a particular way of life or thinking usually involving the imposition of discipline. The term, arising from military regiment, is related to the medical usage of regimen, as in “the patient keeps his prescription medications in separate compartments of a plastic container in order to accurately adhere to his regimen.” Propaganda is the systematic propagation of a doctrine, cause or information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause, as in “ACCME is propagating the view that elaborate re-certification maneuvers will improve the lives of patients.”

A cheerful instructor started the session by asking each of us to introduce ourselves and reveal a “secret guilty pleasure.” Mine is to create elaborate cocktails. If only I had had one of my famous Marty’s Beerjitos with me the whole experience could have been much more pleasant. In addition to the instructor, there were several “super-users” in the room to facilitate the process. It was immediately obvious to me that the super-users hovered behind my chair. These friendly young people had correctly identified me a “super-loser.” Had I been litigious I would have reported the experience to our ombudsperson as blatant ageism.

But, alas, they were correct. I was hopeless. Besides, I don’t believe in ombudspeople. I believe one should speak for oneself.

Will Independent Physicians Go Extinct?

Apr 1, 2015• 21

By RICHARD GUNDERMAN, MD and MATT ALBIN, MD

Life is tough for physicians in solo and small group practice. The federally mandated introduction this fall of ICD-10 requires physicians and their staffs to learn a new system of coding diseases. “Meaningful Use,” another federal program, requires physicians to install and use electronic health records systems, which are complex and expensive. And PQRS, the Physician Quality Reporting System, is beginning to penalize physicians for failing to report individual data for up to 110 quality measures, such as patient immunizations, each of which takes time to collect and record.

Of course, such requirements are not being imposed solely on solo and small-group physicians. In many ways, they affect all physicians alike. Yet the burdens of complying are disproportionately high for small groups, which cannot spread out the costs of purchasing equipment, hiring employees and consultants, and training personnel over so large a number of colleagues. Hospitals and large medical groups can afford to hire full-time specialists to meet these challenges, but such approaches are not economically feasible for a group that consists of only a few physicians.

Such challenges are not just raining down – they are pouring down on the heads of physicians. Some physicians fear they smell a conspiracy to drive solo and small-group practitioners out of business. And the problem is not just the money. It’s also the time. Many physicians already work long hours and simply cannot afford to shop for such systems, negotiate contracts, and enter data. We personally know physicians who report spending two hours each evening completing records that they did not have time to attend to while they were seeing patients.

HIT Newser: Big Win for Epic in San Diego

Apr 1, 2015• 5

By MICHELLE RONAN NOTEBOOM

Epic Scores Another Big Win

Scripps Health selects Epic to replace its existing GE Healthcare’s Centricity Enterprise (inpatient) and Allscripts Enterprise (outpatient). The San Diego-based Scripps includes five acute-care campuses, 26 outpatient clinics, and 2,600 affiliated physicians.

No doubt that this is one that Cerner had hoped to win.

Marlin Equity Partners Acquires e-MDs

Marlin Equity Partners acquires ambulatory EMR provider e-MDs. Marlin will merge e-MDs with its existing portfolio company MDeverywhere, a provider of RCM and credentialing services for physicians. e-MD founderContinue reading…

Let’s Play “What If”—the Data for Health Edition!

Apr 1, 2015• 2

by MICHAEL PAINTER, MD

What if I asked you to talk data—about lots and lots of health data? By that I mean data about you and your community that you and others could use to improve your health.

What if I asked you to sit for hours with others from your community to talk about using the giga-bytes of data from your devices and other sources like electronic health records to help improve health—your health and the health of your community?

Would you play? Would you do that?

Or would you blanch, shake your head incredulous, yawn with boredom and possibly run in the opposite direction?

Well, your colleagues in five cities, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Des Moines, San Francisco and Charleston, SC, played that very game with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and members of our Data for Health advisory committee along with the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and members of her staff.

Boy, did they play.

Last fall in our initiative, Data for Health, the Foundation asked people in those places to spend an entire day talking with us about their hopes, aspirations, worries and concerns with using digital data to improve health.

Honestly, we weren’t at all certain people would play this particular game. We understood—in fact some people told us—that this discussion could seem turgid, distant, maybe even a boring academic hypothetical discussion.

That was not the case.

Turns out it was very easy to draw people into this conversation. People attended and engaged passionately and vigorously. It was a powerful thing to behold.

These people were very interested in using data to improve both their individual as well as their community’s health. Continue reading…

Rooting and Leveraging the Innovation Economy

Mar 31, 2015• 4

by GREGG MASTERS

The use of the term ‘innovation’ is getting pretty worked up lately. In fact, almost every healthcare entity whether health plan, health system, IDN or even ‘mature ACO’ (morphed from an IPA or risk bearing PHO “chassis” or “carcass” as the case may be) seem to have anointed a ‘CIO’ as in ‘chief innovation officer’ to steward the critical transformation from volume-to-value during a yet to be determined period of conflicting if not schizophrenic incentives coupled with its legacy cultural inertia.

In fact some institutions via branded ‘Centers for Innovation or Transformation‘ have made substantial investments in people and infrastructure (“bricks, sticks and platforms”) as well as the promise of the essential ‘firewall inoculation’ and separation from the ‘mother-house’ to catalyze the required re-engineering during a likely period of cannibalization of traditional revenue streams.

So the ancient Chinese curse (paraphrased below) most likely applies here:

..we live in ‘interesting times’ with both ‘danger and opportunity’ before us.

For those tasked with this challenge and fortunate enough to participate in conferences (Health 2.0, Exponential Medicine, Health Datapalooza, TEDMED to name a few of the trophy organizers) at the disruptive and transformational tip of the spear, the nature of the challenge including opportunities to meet and leverage connections of like minded and focus colleagues is a distinct strategic advantage.Continue reading…

Precision Medicine’s First Real Patient: The National Health IT System

Mar 31, 2015• 2

NIAM YARAGHI

In his 2015 State of the Union address President Obama announced the launch of his precision medicine initiative, an audacious initiative to address these issues. In a nutshell, precision medicine customizes health care; That is, medical decisions are tailored based on the individual characteristics of the patients, ranging from their genes to their lifestyle. To have a clear understanding of the relationship between individual characteristics of patients and medical outcomes, it is necessary to collect various types of data from a large population of individuals. The precision medicine initiative requires a longitudinal cohort of one million individuals to provide researchers with various data types including DNA, behavioral data, and electronic health records. Assembling such a large sample of many different data types proposes two unique challenges pertaining to healthcare information technology: interoperability and privacy.

The federal government has already spent $28 billion to incent medical providers to adopt electronic health record (EHR) systems. As a result, almost all of the medical providers in the United States currently compile an electronic archive of their patients’ medical records. However, most of the EHR systems are not able to exchange information with each other. This is a strange problem in the age of information technology and Internet connectivity. There are a variety of technical and economic reasons, which make it especially complicated and difficult to solve.

Given the current lack of interoperability between EHR systems, it seems highly unlikely to be able to obtain a complete medical history of one million Americans. To succeed, the precision medicine initiative has to either overcome the lack of interoperability problem in the nation’s health IT system or to find a way around it. Congress members in both the House and Senate are considering new rules that would stop EHR vendors from interfering with medical providers that had already started transferring records. These efforts are fraught with difficulty and will take a very long time to produce tangible results.Continue reading…

HxRefactored Interview: Care Delivery Innovation with Mulesoft

Mar 30, 2015

Matthew Holt, Co-Chairman of Health 2.0 recently interviewed David Chao, Director of Industry Solutions at Mulesoft. Mulesoft is a “connectivity company” with a vision to connect the world’s data, devices, and applications. During this interview, David shares the challenges within health care and gives an insight into how Mulesoft is re-framing health care delivery and ensuring health data moves freely between multiple systems as well as within organizations to be delivered at the point of care when and where it’s needed the most.

You can see David during the Care Delivery Innovation: Reinventing Access and Expectations session at HxRefactored on April 1-2 in Boston, MA.

What Does Real Meaningful Use of an EHR Look Like?

Mar 30, 2015• 27

By ROB LAMBERTS, MD

I drank the kool-aid early. We installed our first EHR in 1996 with me doing the lion’s share of pushing and pulling. While I’d ultimately turn my back on this passion, I had a number of notable accomplishments before walking down my Damascus road.

Within a year of implementation, our practice became one of the top installations for our vendor.
Within 2 years I was elected to the board of our user group.
Within 4 years I was president.
In 2003, our practice was recognized by HIMSS as one of the top primary care installations of Electronic Records.
In subsequent years I lectured around the country (for HIMSS) extolling the benefits of EHR for both quality and efficiency of care.
As opposed to the experience of other physicians, our practice was not only successful in our implementation, we were in the top 10% in income for our specialty.
Our quality metrics were also routinely far above national norms.
In 2012, I was the physician representative for CDC public health grand rounds, discussing the upcoming EHR incentive program: Meaningful Use.
By 2013, we easily qualified for stage 1 of Meaningful Use, and I happily accepted the financial fruit of my labors.

But the final years were not, as I expected, a triumph. I became increasingly frustrated with the worsening of our EHR by the “features” needed to qualify us for MU1. I also chafed at the way most physicians were meeting this criteria: by abandoning patient-centered care and adopting a data-centered care model. Patients were given useless handouts to summarize “care,” and the data requirement was satisfied. Patient portals gave limited access to information were touted as “patient centered” care, while the product was left unused by most patients, but the data requirement was satisfied.