THCB

Categories

Tag: EHR

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the (EHR) Bomb

• 25

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

Remember the fear mongering rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction and all sorts of other bogey men that sometimes led to war death and true destruction and other times to just animosity, hatred and counterproductive waste of time and resources?

This is exactly what we are witnessing today in Health Information Technology (HIT). Granted this is only a sideshow, while the main stage is occupied by the unprecedented Federal push to computerize medicine, but it has a very shrill voice and it seems to be confusing many good people. There are many legitimate questions that need to be asked, many strategies that should be debated, many errors that must be corrected, but the unsubstantiated, dogmatic and repetitive accusations directed towards HIT in general, EHR in particular, and chiefly at technology vendors and their employees, are borderline pathological in nature.

To be clear here, there are many practicing physicians and nurses who are either forced by an employer to use an EHR they dislike, have tried to use an EHR and didn’t enjoy the experience, or are opposed to the EHR concept on principle because the software has no return on investment in their situation, is not “ready for prime time” or is too closely aligned with the goals of the Federal government. These are all valid points of view and should be listened to and considered by policy makers as well as technology builders, and I have to confess that I do agree with much of what these practicing folks write and say, and as I said many times in the past, practicing physicians, i.e. those who see patients every day, are dangerously underrepresented in all HIT policy and technology decisions being made now at a federal level. Unfortunately, the practicing doctors’ message is being obscured and tainted by the “naysayers who predictably and monotonically chant the “HIT is evil” mantra at every opportunity” (quoting the famed HIT blogger, Mr. Histalk). These “self-proclaimed experts” and their incendiary and largely self-serving monologues are making it very easy to dismiss legitimate problems present in HIT policy and technology.Continue reading…

The Neverending Story

• 38

By STEVE SANDERS

We’re hearing a lot about the use of electronic medical records (EMR) in medicine. The government is all for it—providing financial incentives for those with EMRs and disincentives for those still relying on paper charts to make their way through the world. Most health professionals, especially new physicians in training, simply can’t imagine a world without an EMR at their fingertips.

The ability to electronically capture discrete bits of data on each patient allows us to categorize, tally, and build unbelievably beautiful charts and graphs.

These systems also uncover deficiencies in patient care; with the push of a button, we know whose blood pressure or blood sugar is out of control, or how many patients weigh too much for their height. Clinicians click-through as many templates as possible in order for the system to capture these professional nuggets of information. Nuggets worth their weight in gold to researchers and pharmaceutical companies, eager to market their next blockbuster drug to physicians whose patients just happen to fit their marketing profile.

The trouble is when you’ve seen one template–built patient medical record, you’ve seen them all. These systems do such a great job of capturing discrete bits of data that patients become just that—only discrete bits of data.The essence of who they are, their story, becomes lost in attempts at efficiency.

What interests me about each patient is their story: what’s happening in their life that brings them stress or joy. Are they wanting medication for their cough, or really just needing assurance they don’t have lung cancer. Each visit brings a new chapter, a peeling of the onion allowing me to see the various layers of their personality over time. This is more important than almost any other discrete piece of data we could fit into a template. It takes time and effort to build an electronic medical record that speaks for the patient; time that is often in short supply for busy clinicians.Continue reading…

Are Patients and Interoperability Finally Coming to the Fore of Health IT?

• 4

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD

In recent weeks, I’ve witnessed a huge change among my practicing colleagues. For the first time, the true cost of vendor-proprietary records is seen as an existential issue for practices that may need to join an Accountable Care Organization to survive.

To a doctor in the good old days, IT meant practice management as a tool to get paid. As the days of fee-for-service give way to ACOs and global payments, doctors are starting to realize the direct link between payment, health records and patient engagement.

In a recent essay titled “Show Me the Money” in Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare, Barry Chaiken, MD summarizes:

“Regular assessment of quality performance will identify those providers who might be withholding care or over-utilizing care, helping to balance the equation between clinical and financial objectives. Entities such as ACOs and patient-centered medical homes will either take on the financial risk and therefore share in the savings generated by their transformed care delivery processes or receive added payments, along the lines of current pay-for-performance schemes, for delivering predetermined clinical and financial outcomes.”Continue reading…

Freeing the Data

• 3

By JOHN HALAMKA, MD

I’m keynoting this year’s Intersystems Global Conference on the topic of “Freeing the Data” from the transactional systems we use today such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM),  Electronic Health Records (EHR), etc.  As I’ve prepared my speech,  I’ve given a lot of thought to the evolving data needs we have in our enterprises.

In healthcare and in many other industries, it’s increasingly common for users to ask IT for tools and resources to look beyond the data we enter during the course of our daily work.   For one patient, I know the diagnosis, but what treatments were given to the last 1000 similar patients.  I know the sales today, but how do they vary over the week, the month, and the year?   Can I predict future resource needs before they happen?

In the past, such analysis typically relied on structured data, exported from transactional systems into data marts using Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) utilities, followed by analysis with Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) or Business Intelligence (BI) tools.

In a world filled with highly scalable web search engines,  increasingly capable natural language processing technologies, and practical examples of artificial intelligence/pattern recognition (think of IBM’s Jeopardy-savvy Watson as a sophisticated data mining tool), there are novel approaches to freeing the data that go beyond a single database with pre-defined hypercube rollups.   Here are my top 10 trends to watch as we increasingly free data from transactional systems.Continue reading…

HIMSS11: Setting Expectations

• 3

By JOHN MOORE

Over a 1,000 exhibitors, some 30,000+ attendees and I come away from HIMSS, again, thinking is this all there is? Where is the innovation that the Obama administration i.e., Sec. Sebellius and Dr. Blumenthal both touted in their less than inspiring keynotes on Wednesday morn? Maybe I had my blinders on, maybe I was looking in the wrong places but honestly, outside of the expected, we now have an iPad App for that type of innovation where nearly every EHR vendor has an iPad App for the EHR, or will be realeasing such this year, I just didn’t see anything that really caught my attention. But then again, looking over my posts from previous HIMSS (this was my fourth), maybe my expectations need a serious reset and it would be wise of me to read this post next year before I get on the plane to Las Vegas and HIMSS’12.

Prior to HIMSS I participated in a webinar put on by mobihealthnews (BTW, Brian at mobi has a good article on some of those mobile apps being rolled out at HIMSS this year). My role in this webinar was to give an overview of what one might expect at HIMSS’11. Having weathered the last two HIMSS and the major hype in ’09 about Meaningful Use and ’10 when HIEs were all the rage, this year I predicted that the big hype would be around ACOs. Much to my surprise such was not the case.

The reason was quite simple and two-fold.Continue reading…

Liquid Vapor

• 14

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

For the uninitiated, every year HIMSS runs a big huge trade show for EHR and HIT vendors, which is to the HIT industry what Oscar night is to Hollywood. No, HIMSS does not award any prizes or trophies, but it occasions the same breath taking congregation of all industry glitterati in one place, complete with clever little parties and big extravagant shows. There were well over 30,000 people at this year’s HIMSS11 conference, and although I wasn’t one of them, I made sure to follow the events through the steady Twitter stream and many excellent blogs, reports and interviews, because what happens at HIMSS is good indication for what the HIT industry is doing and where it is going. So to summarize all the excitement, the established HIT folks are doing Meaningful Use, which has become yesterday’s news, with HIE being the next project on the books. Everything is being pushed to tablets and the cutting edge innovations are all about a myriad of small Mobile Health (mHealth) applications. Analytics and business intelligence is looming large on a horizon filled with provider consolidation, capitation and value-based medicine.

On the surface, this seems a very logical succession of events. Meaningful Use is collecting data, HIE will make it liquid and, as predicted, 1000 flowers of innovative mobile applications will eventually be blooming to bring the liquid data to consumers and innovators who will slice and dice it to provide us all with unimaginable medical utility. However, in the excitement of anticipation on those balmy Florida nights, it is easy to overlook the fact that this entire chain of events is based on one assumption: somewhere, somehow, someone will have to enter data into the system, consistently, accurately and in minute detail. For free. Is there a problem here?Continue reading…

Glen Tullman @ HIMSS11

• 3

Glen Tullman, CEO of Allscripts, talked with Matthew about mergers, consolidation and payment changes taking place in the healthcare system.

The Power of a Network: Health Information Exchanges

• 3

By JACK BUXBAUM

The idea behind a network is that it grows stronger as more participants join it. A basic example is a cell phone provider that allows its members to make free calls to other members – the policy becomes more valuable as more people join the network.

Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) work on the same principle – networks connecting electronic health record (EHR) systems, pharmacies, Medicaid Management Information Systems, etc. The idea is sound, but the information shared is only as valuable as the number of participants and the quality of the data and resources.

Interconnectivity and interaction among providers can potentially do so much to raise the standard of patient care that it’s important we do all we can to facilitate participation in HIEs. With that said, we must recognize that it takes time to build quality and we want to make sure we’re getting it right.Continue reading…

Computers in 2020

• 1

By RICHARD REECE, MD

It is 2020.   Computer evaluation of patients before they visit their doctors has come a long way.

Medical records containing  demographic  data,   personal histories,  medication use,  allergies, laboratory results,  radiologic images,  electrocardiograms, rhythm strips, and even the chief complaint and symptoms of the patient ‘s  present illness, as spoken and digitized by the patient,  are available prior to the visit.

These records, synthesized, summarized,  algorithmized,  and otherwise massaged by massive computer banks,  give doctors everything they want to know before seeing ore examining the patient.

  • the differential diagnosis,
  • the most likely cause of the visit,
  • optimal treatment options,
  • a review of recent medical literature in the last 24 hours on the subject,
  • the best current medical practices,
  • the best value for the dollars in the immediate region and at national centers,
  • the best, most cost-effective and results-effective,  specialists  and medical centers  where  to go should further evaluation be needed.
  • the tests and procedures to be done before the patient leaves the office.

This barrage of information is available to consumers and physicians alike before and immediately after the visit.   Furthermore,  with advances in speech recognition,  patients and doctors will be able to talk to the computer in each other’s presence, ask questions, and settle any lingering doubt.Continue reading…

How to Meaningfully Shop for an EHR, Part 2

• 3

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

Research and Observation

Here we are going to talk about the second stage of shopping for an EHR. We are going to assume that you did your homework, defined your goals and constraints and prepared a comprehensive list of requirements for an EHR (if you have not done so already, go back and read Part I). To continue our car shopping analogy, we are now ready to go kick some tires, and we start by calling on each of the three to six EHR vendors on your list. To your folder of lists, add a blank page for each vendor, to log your interactions with the various representatives you will begin encountering shortly. If the sales person is unresponsive and if it takes weeks to have someone call you back, most likely the situation will only deteriorate after they get a hold of your money, so keep good notes.

Calling an EHR Vendor
Whether you start by filling out a form on a website or by sending an email, eventually you will be on the phone with a sales rep. You should be the one directing the conversation. Inform the sales person of your specialty and practice size and explain that you are conducting an EHR search and his company is one of your candidates. Do not disclose the remainder of your list unless you are interested in a “confidential” long lecture on how horrible the competition really is. Your goal here is to obtain contact information (phone and email) of the regional sales executive, inform him/her that you will be sending out a Request for Information (see below) and set a date for your first clinical demonstration of the product. You can listen patiently, if you wish, to the details of this month’s “special offer”, but stick to your agenda and commit to nothing other than a demo. Remember to log your impression from this call, including the vendor’s willingness to accommodate your schedule and the expediency of setting up a demo date.Continue reading…

assetto corsa mods