That’s the finding from a number of health-care industry officials charged with pulling the medical profession into the 21st Century when it comes to managing patient records as well as automating the back-office operations of hospitals and clinics throughout the U.S.
The key is getting patient data automated to the point where doctors don’t have to duplicate costly tests and X-rays, and so more than 35,000 professionals were gathering in Las Vegas this week to get some guidance on where the effort is heading.
Hospital food is getting a makeover. Eager to compete for patients, some hospitals are one upping each other in meal offerings, offering luxury meal order programs.
Zachery Jiwa, chief technology officer for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, is responsible for getting doctors and hospitals online in one of the worst-performing states in the union when it comes to public health issues.
He says as recently as 18 months ago, there was skepticism over whether the effort would get any traction in his state. Now he says enough doctors have met the criteria needed to receive more than $100 million in cumulative federal incentive funding.
“I think it’s a testament that we have a little more certainty,” Jiwa said. “I’m pleased with the acceleration.”
He adds, however, that the movement remains in its infant stages. That’s evidenced by the number of hospitals that can actually exchange records in his state -- two in the central Louisiana town of Lafayette.
“We have a long way to go,” he said, later adding. “It’s hard to change people’s mentality in the South.”
The effort to automate the health-care industry got underway in 2009 as part of the controversial $787 billion stimulus program. A total of $30 billion was set aside as an incentive for doctors and hospitals to transform patient records from analog to digital.
Doctors can receive up to $45,000 each by automating their offices.
Doctors have to meet a number of criteria by the end of 2013 in order to receive those dollars; those who have already jumped through the initial set of hoops have gotten their initial rounds of funding.
But those numbers are small. Part of the problem is getting physicians to change their work habits and bring a laptop or tablet along to the bedside. Another issue is that countless vendors have emerged, all with their own systems, and interoperability issues abound. Read MarketWatch special report on the issue.
And there is no guarantee that true interoperability – the ultimate goal of the effort – will ever be achieved.
Pete Gutierrez is associate chief operating officer for Denver Health, a network of 458 doctors that treat mostly Medicaid and indigent patients. He says 38% of his patients have no insurance at all.
Nevertheless, the non-profit organization has managed to not only stay afloat but prosper. It separated itself from city government and became a private entity in 1997. Gutierrez says Denver Health has been in the black ever since, using a Six Sigma-style operational approach.
When it came time to automate patient records, Denver Health chose Siemens AG /quotes/zigman/279102/quotes/nls/si SI +0.41% /quotes/zigman/206549 DE:SIE +1.01% to partner with and decided that it should be its sole contractor in order to avoid interoperability issues within its own network. Achieving true interoperability, however, with other networks is tough to envision.
“It’s horrible, the amount of duplication,” Gutierrez said. Read more of MarketWatch special report on the issue.
Charlene Underwood chairs the advisory board for Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, or HIMSS, sponsors of the Las Vegas gathering. She says roughly 41,000 of as many as 600,000 doctors nationwide have met the criteria known as “meaningful use.”
Under those guidelines, doctors and hospitals must show they have met certain criteria for automating systems, including prescribing medication via electronic means or ordering and receiving lab results. They also need to create online portals so that patients can have an electronic record of the treatments and medications they’ve received.
Underwood says a total of 176,000 are registered in the program and should be able to meet the “meaningful use” criteria, but the industry has set a goal of having all those doctors, plus another 24,000 up and running by the end of 2012.
Underwood agrees the task is daunting, but she says the industry is motivated.
“People get the goal,” she said. “There is a passion around trying to do it right.”
/quotes/zigman/279102/quotes/nls/si
Russ Britt is the Los Angeles bureau chief for MarketWatch. 
No comments:
Post a Comment