Ken Kizer – The Health Care Blog

How Does the VA’s Technology Rate Against Other EMR Vendors?

Jun 10, 2014• 3

By EDMUND BILLINGS, MD

Health care for veterans has been all over the news. At the same time, the DoD is moving to procure a replacement EHR system. So it seems there is no time like the present to review a recent RAND case studies report entitled “Redirecting Innovation in U.S. Health Care: Options to Decrease Spending and Increase Value.”

The case studies include a chapter comparing America’s two most broadly deployed EHRs: The VA’s VistA and Epic. The tale RAND tells is not one of different EHR technologies, as both VistA and Epic both employ the MUMPS programming language and file-based database. Rather, it is about how different origins, business models and practices have dramatically influenced the respective systems. As the report itself says, the contrast offers “useful insights into the development, diffusion, and potential future of EHRs.”

VistA

VistA, “the archetype of an enterprise-wide EHR solution,” supports the Veterans Health Administration, “the largest integrated delivery system in the United States.” Initial VistA development was a collaborative, distributed, grass-roots effort where individual VA medical centers built out new clinical functionality on a common platform.

In the mid 90’s, VistA became the instrument of change at the VA.

The pace and scope of EHR adoption increased dramatically under the leadership of Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer, who served as the VA’s Undersecretary for Health from 1994 through 1999. Dr. Kizer considered installation of a major system upgrade to be a core element in his effort to transform the organization …Continue reading…

Never Say Never (Events)

Jul 2, 2011• 4

By BOB WACHTER

Earlier this month, the National Quality Forum released its revised list of “Serious Reportable Events in Healthcare, 2011,” with four new events added to the list. While the NQF no longer refers to this list as “Never Events,” it doesn’t really matter, since everyone else does. And this shorthand has helped make this list, which will soon mark its tenth anniversary, a dominant force in the patient safety field.

The NQF was founded in 1999 at the recommendation of Al Gore’s Presidential Advisory Commission on healthcare quality. For its founding chair, the organization selected Ken Kizer, a no-nonsense, seasoned physician-administrator who had just done a spectacular job of transforming the VA system from the subject of scathing articles and movies into a model of high-quality healthcare, a veritable star in patient safety galaxy.

Kizer’s original charge at NQF was to develop a Good Housekeeping seal-equivalent for quality measures (“NQF-endorsed measures”). But soon after he arrived, Kizer added another item to the NQF’s wish list: the creation of a list of medical errors and harm that might ultimately be the subject of a nationwide state-based reporting system. As Kizer said at the time,

This is intended to be a list of things that just should not happen in health care today. For example, operating on the wrong body part [or] a mother dying during childbirth. That’s such a rare event today that it’s generally viewed as something that just shouldn’t happen. Now, there’s probably going to be an occasion now and then when it happens and everything was done right, but it’s so infrequent that it means you have to investigate it every time it occurs. So “never” has quotes around it in this case. Now, wrong-site surgery is a different story—that should never happen. There’s no way that you should take off the right leg when you’re supposed to do the left one. So in this case, never really means never.

Unsurprisingly, the items on the list quickly became known as “Never Events.” Twenty-seven of them were announced in 2002, and the list was expanded and revised four years later. (This primer, written by my colleague Sumant Ranji for our patient safety website, AHRQ Patient Safety Network, is the best description of the list and some of its policy implications.)Continue reading…