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A Shared Roadmap and Vision for Health IT

• 9

By John Halamka, Mark Leavitt & JohnMark Leavitt
Tooker

Today’s economic crisis has highlighted our need for breakthrough improvements in the quality, safety and efficiency of health care. The nation’s business competitiveness is threatened by growing health care costs, while at the same time our citizens risk losing access to care because of unemployment and the decreasing affordability of coverage. Meanwhile, the quality variations and safety shortfalls in our care system have been well documented.

Health IT is not a panacea for all of these challenges, but it is a critical first step toward addressing many of them. Before we can restructure payment systems to reward quality, we need reliable, near real time data on outcomes. Before we can reward teamwork and collaboration that re-integrates care, we need applications that let clinicians communicate patient information instantly and securely. And in order to reverse the growing burden of chronic diseases, we need online connections that engage individuals in their care and motivate them to make healthier lifestyle choices.

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A Shout-out to our sponsors

THCB would not exist without the  support of our generous sponsors. So we’d like to give a shout to our friends at Connextions Health. Connextions Health provides people and technology-driven business process solutions for health care insurers seeking to build or strengthen their consumer direct capabilities; helping plans to attract, acquire & retain individual and small group members. Visit Connextions Health. to learn more. Thanks guys!!! Interested in reaching a national monthly audience of 75,000 healthcare-obsessed readers? Drop us a ****@***************og.com“>line. We’ll get back to you with rates and options.

Someone sit Michael Cannon down before telling him this!

• 4

By Matthew Holt

Matthew HoltApparently there some kind of experimental clinical innovation going on in the UK. If this isn’t a typo from 
the Torygraph, how is the mental model of the free-marketeers going to survive? I suspect that Gratzer, Giuliani, Kling & the rest had better join Michael in taking a seat. Yup, communism can mean innovation, (after all who won World War II)?

Meanwhile there is a little more news on the topic of Cato (Michael’s employer). First, they created some economic stimulus of their own Monday, with a one page ad in the WSJ opposing the economic stimulus package.

But they haven’t been listening to Robert Reich and the others suggesting that we get money into the hands of the poor to create more immediate economic impact, or at least they weren’t paying attention when they gave their cash to Rupert Murdoch. Perhaps they should have put it in Street Sheet instead!

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Locating the “Medical Home”

• 3

By Josh SeidmanSiedman

There’s no doubt that people — especially those with (multiple)
chronic conditions — need a more holistic model for managing their
health needs than what our delivery system currently offers. The PCMH
model is intriguing, but I have worried that many examples of PCMH
deployment thus far have been centered around the physician’s office
(and, to some extent, the physician’s needs).

In contrast, most patients with health problems are living 24/7 with
whatever is affecting their quality of life, and not much of it is
spent in the doctor’s office. Think about it: There are 8,760 hours in
a year, and how many of them are spent in a health care facility?
Unless someone has multiple hospitalizations in a given year, the
answer is probably far less than 1 percent.

I’ve been fascinated for a long time now by the potential of Ix and
Health 2.0 strategies to deliver to us more robust models of truly
patient-centered medical homes than we have seen in most of the
country. Thankfully, other (smarter) people have also been thinking
about this and were able to join us to present in a recent webinar.

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Commentology

• 2

Former Medscape and Journal of the American Medical Association Editor Dr. George Lundberg had this response to Dr. John Haughton's opinion piece on government Health IT spending. ("Stimulus Bill Offers Docs Big Incentives but Demands Effective Use.")

"There are many reasons why physicians in general (excluding
pathologists, radiologists, intensivists, anesthesiologists,large
multi-specialty groups) have not yet embraced healthcare information
technology. I refer interested readers to for Blake Lesselroth's unique take
on the barriers to full clinician adoption of HIT and how to overcome
some of them.

 Dr. Robert Rowley's post  on his company's advertising based  electronic medical record system ("Freenomics and Healthcare IT') prompted this response from Scott Shreeve MD

I was an early critic of Practice Fusion when I first heard of their business model. However, I have come around for many of the reasons that Dr. Rowley and Dr. Kibbe mention. In fact, I would suspect that I am the only commenter on this section that has actually used the software in to take care of patients (Crossover Health personal health advisory service).  Getting a tool (an EMR) into the hands of providers (much better than paper) who can use it to improve patient care is a good thing. The fact that the tool comes with some branded messaging is tolerated because the price (free) and the ease of use is so compelling (installed in minutes).

In terms of software, I have found the features/functionality of the software to be sufficient for now, the look and feel to adequate, and the rate of ongoing development to be intriguing (several key updates over last several months). There are definitely some holes that need to be plugged, some functionality that needs to be added, but overall I find it from an EMR perspective to be "good enough".

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Certification versus Meaningful Use

• 4

By JOHN HALAMKA, MD

Halamka

Recently, clinicians have asked me “why should I implement my organization’s preferred EHR when I’ve found a less expensive vendor that promises meaningful use?”

This illustrates a basic misunderstanding of the difference between Certification and Meaningful Use.

The certification process will be codified in a December 2009 Notice of Proposed Rulekmaking (NPRM) and will define the process for certifying electronic health records including modular and open source approaches. (The Standards for data exchange will be codified in a December 2009 Interim Final Rule and become law immediately.) We know that ONC will specify certification criteria and that NIST will oversee certification conformance testing which will be performed by multiple organizations. However, we will not have the final certification criteria or the defined process until Spring after a period of comment on the NPRM.Continue reading…

Grand Rounds

• 7

By Matthew Holt

Welcome to Grand Rounds. It's been quite some time
since THCB hosted the medical blogosphere's major compendium. So sit
back and enjoy a stroll through the gardens of medical and health care
obsession.

It's still a fresh political season, so we start with the wonks:

At TNR's The Treatment blog, Jonathan Cohn gets a top administration official to confirm
that health care will be a "central focus" of the budget proposal Obama
submits in a few weeks, signaling a major commitment to reform even
with Tom Daschle gone. He also runs down some possible successors to
Daschle and decides Howard Dean won't be the man, even though he'd do a great job.

Elsewhere on The Treatment, Harold Pollack says it's bad enough the U.S. opposes successful harm reduction strategies for drug addiction at home. Why do we have to use our clout to discourage other countries, too?

At Health Business Blog David Williams thinks that universal coverage
is a worthy goal, but says that if we get there by enrolling everyone in existing
public and private insurance schemes and maintaining existing levels of
utilization we’ll be doomed.

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Jon Cohn: Obsessed with baseball and a hopeless optimist

• 7

By Matthew Holt

Jon thinks that Baseball Teaches Us (something) About Health Care Reform. Replace the star player with a bunch of utility infielders, and we’ll still win the pennant. Don’t worry Jon, Daschle isn’t the only one who came in with high hopes and didn’t make it through the week. So long Luiz Felipe!

But more importantly, unity (for the bailout) is a bust already, less than two full weeks into the Obama Administration with only 3 Republican Senators prepared to buck Rush Limbaugh, and then at a pretty big cost to the President and common sense. As Krugman pointed out today, bipartisanship is a crock, with the Republicans telling Obama to go whistle despite his bail-out package being less in total and way less in degree than a centrist Democrat would want. He left in all those tax cuts to please Republicans and they dissed it anyway.

So what would the Republicans do if serious health reform came up for discussion? I think I know! And if Obama starts with an already watered-down plan, it’ll just get more watered down.

How Goo-Goos Listen to the Grassroots

• 3

By Michael Millenson

Back in December, after the Obama-Biden Transition Team encouraged individuals across the country to gather with friends and neighbors to talk about health care reform, I reported on My Health Care Reform House Party.

Turns out these Obamanians are far more serious goo-goos than I gave them credit for. Goo-goos, for you non-Chicagoans, are those earnest “good government” types with a deep and abiding belief in rationality in government. When the Obama team said it wanted the input of the masses into its health care reform plan, my brain translated that as, “What better time than the Christmas season to encourage earnest talk about the plight of the poor and uninsured.” But here we are approaching mid-February, with a President Obama playing for keeps with Congress, and the White House says it is doing both a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the feedback it received from ordinary citizens.

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