Tag: EHR

Harvard Study Gets it Wrong on EHRs and Quality

Nov 20, 2009• 8

By GLENN LAFFEL MD, PhD

America’s hospitals are a triumph of modernity, stocked as they are with PET scanners, ECMO machines, and ICUs bedecked in eye-popping gadgetry.

They are also the most complex organizations ever created by man. The seemingly simple process of delivering a drug from the pharmacy to the bedside for example, typically involves a 30-step process executed by a half-dozen people on 3 floors. There are hundreds of ways it can fail.

It often does, and that’s just half the story. Each hospitalized patient requires a unique combination of services including lab tests, physical therapy, a discharge plan and so forth. Since a complex process must be executed to produce each service, the hospital becomes a job shop.

By contrast, the processes used to produce cars and silicon chips are relatively unfettered. That is why piston rods can be produced in batches with every item meeting specs to the micron, while hospital processes often feature error rates of 10-20%.

This explains why hospitals have struggled for decades to improve quality. It also explains why a study by Ashish Jha and colleagues at Harvard has shown that hospitals using electronic health records (EHRs) don’t have better quality.

Where were you?

Nov 9, 2009• 4

By MICHAEL PAINTER

I distinctly remember the first time I heard the title, “National Coordinator for Health Information Technology”. It was 2004. That’s, of course, the year that RAND released its important national report card highlighting the overall mediocre state of health care quality. You know the one that told us “it’s a flip of a coin.” I was an RWJF Health Policy Fellow working on the Hill with then Majority Leader Bill Frist’s health policy staff.

There was a flurry of staff activity regarding the president’s pending executive order pushing adoption of the electronic health record and creating a new federal health information technology, dare I say, czar. . . . But what to call this new position? To be honest, when I initially heard folks say the words, “national coordinator for health information technology,” my first thought was, “Well, that’s a mouthful.” My second was “It sort of sounds like a character from that TV show, ‘The Love Boat’”. But I kept those smart remarks to myself and quite quickly got on board—and, to be honest, never looked back.Continue reading…

Back to Basics: Toward a Core Set of Relevant and Portable Personal Health Information

Nov 3, 2009• 21

By DAVID KIBBE

In the cacophony of health IT issues, products, and goals that compete every day for our attention, it is easy to lose sight of the profound value that could come from the universal availability of a simple core set of relevant and portable personal health information in digital format.

If everyone in the country who wanted one, and if every doctor or nurse taking care of a patient needing one, had access to a digitally formatted set of current health data about the person in question, we as a country would benefit at many levels. I am talking about basic information — such as demographics, a problem and diagnosis list, a list of medications, allergies, recent vital signs (blood pressure, weight, etc.), and information about the most recent health care encounters. Individuals would get more continuous care and better coordinated care decisions. Payers would pay for fewer duplicated or unnecessary tests and procedures. Doctors would face less risk of error when making decisions in the ER. Researchers would give us better feedback on populations of patients, e.g. those with diabetes, to improve care and care processes. And the whole of society would benefit from a real-time, steadily enhanced knowledge database about what works to promote wellness, health, and to lower health care costs.Continue reading…

A Message to America’s Physicians: Purchasing EHR Technology A Shaky State of Affairs

Oct 28, 2009• 31

By Brian Klepper and David Kibbe

Much of the conversation and debate about physician EHR adoption has centered on the single issue of the (high) cost of purchase. However, we’d like to suggest that the situation is much more complex and involves several more subtle variables.

Consider, for example, uncertainty about the future. In a recent speech, Lawrence Summers, Director of the White House’s National Economic Council for President Barack Obama, related the following analysis about decision-making under conditions of uncertainty in the marketplace, which he had first heard from Ben Bernanke, current Chairman of the Federal Reserve, in a speech Mr. Bernanke gave over 30 years ago:

“If you as a business were considering buying a new boiler, and if you knew the price of energy was going to be high, you would buy one kind of boiler. If you knew the price of energy was going to be low, you’d buy another kind of boiler. If you didn’t know what the price of energy was going to be, but you thought you would know a year from now, you wouldn’t buy any boiler at all. And in exactly that way, it is illustrated that the reduction of uncertainty, through the resolution of disputes, is, I would suggest, all important, if we are to maintain confidence.”Continue reading…

Change The Rules and Get Your Labs

Oct 19, 2009• 4

By PHIL MARSHALL

In 1999 Caresoft developed a consumer web portal called the Daily Apple. The Daily Apple wasn’t all that unique or different than other health portals, until in May of 2000 they began helping consumers download their lab test results from Quest Diagnostics. Now THAT was different! A portal aggregating real clinical data on behalf of consumers, with the potential to drive personalized health information, recommendations, and alerts to the individual. “Looks like your exercise and your diet are keeping your blood sugar under good control. Great Job!” and “Your liver enzymes are elevated, which might be due to your Lipitor. You should talk with your doctor.” Now that’s information a person can use! But sometimes even the best ideas suffer from poor market timing. It was only 19 months later, in December, 2001, that the service was discontinued. Many of us on the outside wondered why such a seemingly unique and valuable service would be disabled. But whether it was the lawyers, the doctors, or the business model, timing wasn’t right.

Only a couple years later, in 2003, the Office of Civil Rights at HHS wrote the HIPAA Privacy Rule regulations, allowing consumers to access a copy of their own protected health information. But they carved out lab data as a special case. Lab data (or data governed under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments, or CLIA), was to be governed under CMS regulations that stated that lab test results could only be delivered to “Authorized Persons”, defined as “an individual authorized under state law to order tests or receive test results, or both.”Continue reading…

Why Standards Matter 2: Health IT Enters a New Era of Regulatory Control

Oct 14, 2009• 12

By DAVID C. KIBBE and BRIAN KLEPPER

David Kibbe The recent history of electronic medical records in ambulatory care, or what we now call EHR (electronic health record) technology, can be divided roughly into three phases. Phase I, which lasted approximately 20 years, from about 1980 to the early 2000’s, was an era of exploration and early adaptation of computers to outpatient medicine. It coincided with the availability of PCs that were cheap enough to be owned by many doctors, and with the increased capacity of off-the-shelf software programs, mainly spreadsheet and database management systems such as Lotus, Excel, Access, and Microsoft’s SQL, to lend themselves to computerized capture of health data and information. Phase II coincided roughly with the American Academy of Family Physician’s (AAFP’s) commitment to health IT as a core competency of the organization, and with its support/promotion of the early commercial vendors in the Partners for Patients program, a national educational campaign inaugurated in 2002 which involved joint venturing with vendors that included Practice Partners, MedicaLogic, eClinicalWorks, and eMDs, among others. Several other physician membership organizations joined this effort to popularize EMRs, or crafted their own education programs for their members based on the AAFP’s model. The most popular Phase II products were, and still are for the most part, client-server software applications that run on local networks and PCs within the four walls of a practice, and tend to use very similar programming development tools, back-end databases, and support for peripherals such as printers. The industry grew, albeit sluggishly, from roughly 2002-present in an unregulated environment, with increasing support from quasi-official industry groups like HIMSS and CCHIT, and with the blessing of many professional organizations, including the AAFP, ACP, AOA, and the AAP. Best estimates are that the numbers of physicians using EHR technology from a commercial vendor roughly tripled during this period, from about 5% of physicians to about 15%. The Bush administration gave moral support to the industry, but did not provide funding or payment incentives, and mostly left the industry to itself to sort out the rules, including certification. The industry is now entering a new phase, one we predict will significantly depart from the previous two eras.Continue reading…

The Long Tail of the EMR

Oct 7, 2009• 14

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

In the fall of 2008 I had the opportunity to do some research on the, then dormant, EMR marketplace. The results came as no surprise. Most physicians did not have an EMR and were not interested in adopting an EMR due to cost and usability barriers.

Much has changed in one short year. Spurred by ARRA and its HITECH portion, there is a renewed interest for technology in the physician community. Some of it came from the promise of stimulus funds and some stems from the perceived inevitability of the need to have technology in one’s office. There is no feverish anticipation of the great things an EMR will bring to a medical practice. Instead, there seems to be a somber resignation to the upcoming demise of a trusted friend: the paper chart.Continue reading…

Health 2.0 Accelerator Demonstrates Integration of Consumer Web Apps and EHRs

Oct 7, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – October 7, 2009 – Health 2.0 Accelerator member companies today joined together at the Fall 2009 Health 2.0 Conference to demonstrate a streamlined, consumer-centric integration among nine separate technologies creating a more streamlined user experience.

During the conference “Tools Panel”, eight Health 2.0 Accelerator members MediKeeper, change:healthcare, Sage, Kryptiq, MedSimple, Polka, ReliefInsite, PharmaSURVEYOR and Kinnexxus worked together to demonstrate a seamless, end-to-end user experience across disparate Health 2.0 applications. The demonstration enabled a consumer persona to sign into their personal health record and utilize their personal and clinical health information across several applications while using Microsoft’s HealthVault data sharing platform without having to re-enter information. The demonstration also utilized the Drug Code Lookup Service being piloted by member companies First DataBank and PharmaSURVEYOR that provides easy online access to First DataBank’s standardized drug codes to promote interoperability among Internet-based healthcare services.Continue reading…

Medical Data in the Internet “Cloud” – Data Privacy

Sep 27, 2009• 12

By ROBERT ROWLEY, MD

The concepts of “security” and “privacy” of medical information (Protected Health Information, or PHI) are closely intertwined. “Security,” as described in the second part of this series, has to do with breaking into medical data (either data at rest, or data in transit) and committing an act of theft. “Privacy,” on the other hand, has to do with permissions, and making sure that only the intended people can have access to PHI.

So, who actually “owns” the medical record? The legal status of medical records “ownership” is that they are the property of those who prepare them, rather than about whom they are concerned. These records are the medico-legal documentation of advice given. Such documentation, created by physicians about patients, is governed by doctor-patient confidentiality, and cannot be discovered by any outside party without consent. HIPAA Privacy Rules govern the steps needed to ensure that this level of confidentiality is protected against theft (security) and against unauthorized viewing (privacy). HIPAA-covered entities (medical professionals and hospitals) are held accountable for ensuring such confidentiality, and can be penalized for violation.

The question of privacy, then, revolves around sharing PHI between professionals in order to coordinate health care – after all, health care is delivered by networks (formal or informal), and data sharing is necessary to deliver best-practices levels of care. In the traditional world of paper charts, record-sharing is accomplished by obtaining consent from the patient (usually a signed document placed in the chart), and then faxing the appropriate pages from the chart to the intended recipient. Hopefully the recipient’s fax number is dialed correctly, since faxing to mistaken parties is a vulnerability for unintended privacy violation using this technology.

When medical data moves from a paper chart to a locally-installed EHR, the organization of medical data across the landscape is not really changed – each practice keeps its own database (the equivalent of its own paper chart rack), and imports/exports copies of clinical data to others according to patient permission (just like with traditional paper records). Such clinical data sharing is often done by printout-and-fax, or by export/import of Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs) if the EHR systems on each end support such functionality.

As technology evolves, new layers of medical data sharing emerge, which challenge the simple traditional “give permission and send a copy” method of ensuring privacy. Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are emerging regionally and nationally, and are supported by the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for health IT. HIEs are intended to be data-exchange platforms between practitioners who might be using different EHR systems (that do not natively “talk” to each other). Only certain types of data are uploaded by an EHR into an HIE – patient demographic information, medication lists, allergies, immunization histories. HIEs, then, function as a sort of evolving “library” of protected health data, where local EHRs feed their data on a patient-permission-granted basis, and can download data (if granted the permission to do so) as needed. The potential impact on quality of care is dramatic.

In addition to being a “library” of shared data, HIEs can serve to assist in public health surveillance. This can range from CDC-based surveillance of the emergence or prevalence of specific diseases, to FDA-based post-market surveys of the use of new medications (and shortening the timeline for identifying problems should they arise). This sort of use of HIE data is de-identified, so that permissions around using PHI are not violated – patient-specific data in HIEs is only used with permission, and used for direct patient care (e.g. downloading into your own EHR your patient’s immunization history).

HIEs, however, are essentially a “bridge technology” that tries to connect a landscape where health data remains segregated into “data silos.” A newer frontier of technology can be seen arising from web-hosted, Internet “cloud”-based EHRs, such as Practice Fusion. In this setting, a single data structure serves all practices everywhere, and local user-permissions determine which subset of that data are delivered as a particular practice’s “charts.” This technology raises the potential to actually share a common chart among multiple non-affiliated practitioners – based upon one physician referring a patient to another for consultation (with the patient’s permission to make the referral), both practices are then allowed access to the shared chart, see each other’s chart notes, view the patient medications, review labs already done (reducing duplication of services), see what imaging has already been accomplished, securely message one another, and even create their own chart-note entries into the common, shared chart.

This “new frontier” of technology, where clinical chart sharing between practices (based on patient permission) occurs across all boundaries of care, makes the Practice Fusion vision an “EHR with a built-in HIE.” Extending this even further – shared EHRs and linkage with Personal Health Records (PHRs) – is beyond the scope of this particular article, and will be addressed subsequently. With good design, as pioneered here, the balance between ensuring security and privacy of PHI on the one hand, and permission-based sharing of clinical information for the betterment of overall health care delivery on the other hand, a truly remarkable technology is being built. The impact on transforming health care is profound.

Dr. Rowley is a family practice physician and Practice Fusion’s Chief Medical Officer. Dr. Rowley has a first-hand perspective on the technology needs and challenges faced by healthcare practitioners from his 30 year career in the sector, including experience as a Medical Director with Hill Physicians Medical Group and as a developer of the early EMR system Medical ChartWizard. His family practice in Hayward, CA has functioned without paper charts since 2002. You can find more of his writing at the Practice Fusion Blog, where this post first appeared.

If you liked this post you might be interested in these related posts:

Medical Data in the Internet “Cloud” (part 1) – Data Safety
Is “Cloud Computing” Right for Health IT?
Freenomics and Healthcare IT
Practice Fusion gets investment from Salesforce.com

September 27, 2009 in EHR/EMR, Privacy | Permalink

Catalyzing the app store for EHRs

Sep 27, 2009• 4

By STEVE DOWNS and JOHN LUMPKIN, MD

Recently, Steve posted about the idea, floated by Ken Mandl and Zak Kohane, that EHRs (or health IT more broadly) could move to a model of competitive, substitutable applications running off a platform that would provide secure medical record storage. In other words, the iPhone app model, but, for example, you could have an e-prescribing app that runs over an EHR instead of the Yelp restaurant review app on your iPhone. We’re thinking about the provider side of the market here, as Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are already doing this on the consumer side.

It’s nice to ponder these “what ifs,” but we’re a bit more action-oriented here and we’ve turned our attention to asking what it would take to make this happen. It seems that there are two things that are needed. First, we need the platform. Some of the most notable platforms started out as proprietary that were then opened up. The IBM PC comes to mind as an example. Some were designed from the beginning to be open platforms with limited functionality until the market started developing applications. A recent example is the development of iGoogle and the tons of applications that are available for free. Finally, there was the purely public domain development from the beginning to end that we’ve seen in the Linux world. Or perhaps we don’t need a common platform and maybe what is needed is to stimulate the market for health IT products that have open application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow for third-party application development? Several ideas come to mind.Continue reading…