Uber Ops To Lead Florida In PHLIP ETOR Salmonella Project February 12, 2011
Posted by gonzalezloumiet in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, APHL, Data Integration, Health Care, HIT, Interoperability.2 comments
February 12, 2011 – Tallahassee, Florida – The Uber Operations team will be leading the Florida Department of Health in the Public Health Laboratory Interoperability Project (PHLIP) – Electronic Test Order & Result (ETOR) Salmonella project.
The ETOR Salmonella project will facilitate the orders of Salmonella tests by a state public health agency/lab to the CDC. The test order will flow through the CDC Public Health Laboratory Interoperability Solutions and Solution Architecture (PHLISSA) infrastructure. Once the test is resulted in the CDC’s Laboratory Information Management System, Starlims, the result message will flow out through PHLISSA and back to the state public health agency/lab. The Florida RnR Hub will have a key role as the states will use this for message transport facilitation. Other states involved in the project are Iowa and Utah. The project is sponsored by the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
The project kicked off this past week. We look forward to leading Florida and will update this blog post as we progress throughout the year.
UberOps to Attend HIMSS11 and Newly Announced Latino Initiative Workgroup January 24, 2011
Posted by gonzalezloumiet in Health Care, HIT, NHIN, Technology.Tags: Health IT, HIMSS, Latino, ONC
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We are proud to announce that we will be participating at the HIMSS 2011 Conference in Orlando, Florida.
Also, Eduardo Gonzalez Loumiet, Managing Director for Uber Operations, is part of the host committee for the newly announced HIMSS Latino Initiative Workgroup reception, to be held on February 20th at the Orange County Convention Center. This program, which has been in the works for close to a year, will finally get an opportunity to facilitate the efforts of health IT in the underserved communities. The event will include several health care leaders, including Antonia Coello Novello, M.D. .
You can register here
If you would like to meet during the conference, please feel free to contact Eduardo at: eduardo@uberops.com .
Health Care In Bits April 13, 2009
Posted by gonzalezloumiet in EMR, Forbes, Health Care, HIT.add a comment
CIO Chat
Ed Sperling, 04.13.09, 6:00 AM ET
The health-care industry is a study in contrasts. On one hand, it employs the best that medical science has to offer. On the other, it is one of the least automated sectors from an IT standpoint.
All of that is about to change, however, spurred as much by the federal government’s push for cost control and accountability in health care as the industry’s own need for modern information exchange. The task for implementing those changes will fall on CIOs at hospitals and clinics, as well as the companies that outsource records and information for doctor’s offices and outpatient facilities. Forbes caught up with Geoff Brown, CIO at Inova Health System, a non-profit hospital group in Virginia, to talk about what’s happening.
Forbes: How automated are your IT systems at this point?
Geoff Brown: We’ve been on a construction journey for the past several years. We’re implementing what’s known in health-care jargon as “advanced clinical solutions.” You hear about “computerized physician order entry,” which involve organizations–outpatient groups, physicians, clinics or hospitals–moving away from handwritten notes, charts and prescriptions. On the in-patient side, we’re implementing those changes. The next step will be creating systems where that information will be captured by hospitals.
What kind of information?
When you go to a physician’s office today, you fill out a piece of paper on a clipboard about what medicines you take, what allergies you have, what previous conditions you had, and then the physician writes up those notes. They may have documentation about your condition or state in a problem list. Typically, that information is kept in a medical record within that practice. It is not accessible by any other source unless someone physically makes a copy.
There’s been a lot of talk about the government funding electronic medical records. What’s happening there?
This involves in-patient EMR (electronic medical records) and out-patient EMR in physician offices, which typically are not connected at all. Many offices don’t even have systems to collect that information and provide decision support to physicians. If you need to send that information to a specialist, it’s done by fax or phone, or records are given to the patient to carry over there. It’s all manual and, in many cases, there are interpretation challenges.
What effect will this have on patient care?
I believe it will improve patient care. If you’re a 50-year-old male with a certain illness and you have allergies, I–the doctor–might be busy and forget to look at the chart when I’m prescribing medicine for you. I might not remember you’re allergic to penicillin. When I prescribe this new medicine, it will trigger a warning that this conflicts with your history–because you’re allergic to something or, based on other medicine you’re taking, I should prescribe something else.
So the new systems can help the physician by providing a second check. When you think about 40 or 50 people flowing through a practice during a single day, this can be a significant help.
How about response time for treatment?
That’s a second area where EMR will improve care. Whether those tests are done within a practice or down the road at a lab, you can have access to the results immediately. There also will be a list of drugs maintained by that practice, as well as another level of other combinations of drugs that can be prescribed.
How about a doctor’s handwriting, which is legendary for being illegible?
When someone writes in script and it has to be taken to someone else to enter it or interpret it, there are times when there are mistakes with that translation. You put a big dent in communications problems with EMR. Orders are clear. There are no translation issues. It’s just as the physician intended it to be. Everybody else who’s part of your care process has the ability to access this information, too, so they can structure care. There’s also widespread belief this will save money. When you go from one doctor’s practice into another, they often re-order work-ups because they don’t have access to the existing information. They need to see certain results for themselves before they prescribe a course of medicine.
Let’s back up here a second. Will expert systems also provide the best knowledge available about a condition?
Yes. The term being used is “evidence-based practice.” That’s exactly what it allows you to do. Physicians can still perform a course of action if they know someone is allergic to a drug. They just say: “This is what we need to do.” But electronic records give them a reminder. Doctors aren’t prevented from practicing medicine in a certain way. The software just throws that point out so the doctors can give a reason why they’re taking an action.
Does all of this get reported into a massive database so you can see the probability a treatment will work?
Yes, that’s part of what you see in quality reporting. In most cases, a lot of the electronic medical record solutions have processes like that. The data is aggregated. You can see what the practice is, how your patient outcome compares to the mean, including what the top and low ends are and how you fit within that rating. When you think about all the variations that occur, there’s not a single practitioner I’ve met who doesn’t want to do the best for their patients. If you can provide this evidence-based protocol at the time of service, it’s much like when you go into your e-mail and delete something and it asks, ‘Are you sure you want to delete this?’ It gives you that extra check. Ultimately, we all believe it will reduce errors, improve care, cut waste and time and improve throughput of patients.
Doesn’t this also allow people who are not physicians to follow the prescribed protocol instead of everyone having to wait for the doctor?
That’s correct. The [health-care providers] can create templates. In cases of alleged malpractice, the providers can look at the templates. Here’s the protocol for diabetes, for example. It will eliminate variations among practices. We would be more certain that the same protocol would be followed. If I had two locations where I practiced, all patients would be given the same roadmap.
Connecting the Dots of Medicine and Data April 12, 2009
Posted by gonzalezloumiet in EMR, Health Care, HIT.1 comment so far
April 12, 2009
Fresh Starts
By CHRISTINE LARSON
RUSS CUCINA, 37, lives a double life. For two months of the year, he practices internal medicine, treating patients at the UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco. The rest of the year, he helps the hospital develop its electronic medical records and other data systems.
As a medical doctor who also has a master’s degree in biomedical informatics, Dr. Cucina has a foot in both worlds — medicine and technology — and can bridge the sometimes daunting gap between them.
“I’m the glue between the I.T. enterprise and the clinical leadership,” said Dr. Cucina, the hospital’s associate medical director of information technology. “Because I have the vocabulary of both sides, I can serve as translator between them.”
Such translators, known as “health informatics specialists,” typically have expertise in medical records and claims, clinical care and programming.
“The health I.T. people run the servers and install software, but the informatics people are the leaders, who interpret and analyze information and work with the clinical staff,” said William Hersh, chairman of the department of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology at Oregon Health and Science University.
The federal government’s economic stimulus package is dedicating $19 billion to speeding the adoption of electronic health records, so demand for health informatics specialists is skyrocketing. “My rough estimate is that we need about 70,000 health informaticians,” said Don E. Detmer, president and chief executive of the American Medical Informatics Association, a nonprofit industry group.
Health informatics specialists usually start as computer programmers or as doctors, nurses, pharmacists or health record administrators. After earning a graduate degree in health informatics, they may move into midlevel or senior positions at hospitals, doctor’s offices, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies or other organizations concerned with health data.
Amen Amusan, 36, of Minneapolis, works for a technology company developing programs to help hospitals analyze claims data. After receiving an undergraduate degree in computer science, she enrolled in a health informatics master’s program at the University of Minnesota.
When she finished her degree in December 2007, she took a job paying almost 50 percent more than her previous one. (The big bump was only partly because of her degree; she also moved from a nonprofit to a for-profit company.) “I was getting two or three calls a day from recruiters and going on interviews every day,” she said.
Midlevel jobs, like those for clinical analysts or informatics analysts, typically pay around $70,000 a year, according to the association, but salaries can be much higher at senior levels like that of chief clinical information officer. Other senior level jobs, which sometimes require a Ph.D., include leadership roles at medical device, life science or insurance companies.
Consulting firms are also hiring health informatics experts to serve their health care clients. “A lot of hospitals have to hire external consultants to do the work because they’re constrained by the availability of resources,” said Hui Cao, 31, of New York, a senior consultant at Deloitte, who earned her doctorate in biomedical informatics at Columbia University.
Currently, there are no educational, licensing or credential requirements for health informaticians. Still, training programs are proliferating. Within the past four years, St. Louis University, the University of Minnesota and Oregon Health and Science University have all added master’s programs or certificates in health informatics.
At the same time, many universities are offering short courses or certificate programs to train working health care providers or programmers in informatics. Some schools are adding associate degrees or undergraduate majors.
These programs can bear a bewildering variety of names. Typically, “medical” or “biomedical” informatics programs focus on data that doctors need for treating patients. “Bioinformatics” programs stress biological or genetic data, while “health informatics” programs often emphasize clinical data and health records. Even among programs with the same name, the emphasis may vary.
“You can’t tell by the title what these programs are truly offering,” warned Claire Dixon-Lee, executive director of the Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics and Information Management Education, which accredits academic programs offering degrees in health informatics. “Students have to truly look closely at what courses are being taught.”
IT takes more than technical skills and an understanding of health care to succeed as a health informatician. Diplomacy skills are crucial in connecting two potentially contentious groups: doctors and programmers.
Dr. Cucina tries to head off conflict and help both sides avoid errors. He once caught a well-intentioned mistake in an electronic medical record design that would have been glaringly obvious to any physician. If he hadn’t gently suggested a correction, he said, “it would have been an embarrassment to the entire medical record project that would be hard to live down.”
Fortunately, he said, heading off such problems and creating a system that works well for both sides can be highly rewarding. When he does his job right, he said, “we can create a common vision for health care information technology.”
New law helps open source April 2, 2009
Posted by gonzalezloumiet in EHR, HHS, HIT, Mirth, open source, Stimulus Plan.add a comment
• By John Moore
• Mar 30, 2009
The economic stimulus law mentions health information technology dozens of times, establishing an agenda to promote electronic health records, form standards committees and work out health information privacy and security impasses.
However, the $20 billion package also contains a more obscure provision that has buoyed hopes among advocates of open-source technologies projects that have struggled to gain acceptance in the health IT marketplace.
Tucked away in the law is a call to explore open-source technologies in the healthcare setting. The provision directs the Health and Human Services Department to conduct a report on the “availability of open-source health information technology systems.”
The study will look into the availability of heath IT open source systems and compare its total cost of ownership to proprietary systems. Congress must report on the progress of the study by Oct. 1, 2010. Although a relatively minor provision, open-source advocates consider it significant.
“This is first actual piece of federal legislation that explicitly uses the term open source,” said Richard Li, product marketing director for healthcare at Red Hat, an open source software company. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) sponsored the amendment that set up the open-source study. His staff could not be reached for comment.
Li said Rockefeller was especially interested in open source as a way to serve small, rural healthcare providers. Consequently the amendment has a rural slant, calling on HHS to consider the circumstances of “healthcare providers located in rural or other medically underserved areas.” “Small rural providers don’t have large enough health IT budgets and little internal expertise,” Li noted. Red Hat worked with Senate and House members to support the open source study and other health IT provisions.
Cost is a huge consideration in heath IT adoption, particularly for underserved communities, said Kiki Nocella, chief executive officer of Believe Health, a health consulting firm. Nocella cited her work with a rural regional health information organization in Tehachapi, Calif., which took the open-source route.
“On the whole, the open source approach was less expensive when we did our RFP process than the proprietary approaches,” she said.
Open source allows for greater customization, an important feature for underserved communities, Nocella said. Smaller, rural communities are not smaller versions of urban centers, she noted, but have requirements that might be unique to the community. In contrast, a vendor of proprietary systems tends to scale their offerings to fit the price point of rural customers. But that method can eliminate important health IT features.
Although the ARRA study might mark a greater federal interest in open source, projects such as Tehachapi’s were already on Washington’s radar. Over the course of the project, its team met with officials from the federal Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT. “Part of what they found intriguing was the efficiency” of using open source to build the project, Nocella said.
Deborah Bryant, public sector communities manager at Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, said the HHS study reflects growing interest in open source as an opportunity for health IT.
“I don’t believe this study would have been funded if there wasn’t already an awareness that there are many projects out there that are already underway,” she said.
About the Author
John Moore is a freelance writer based in Syracuse, N.Y. You can reach him at editor@govhealthit.com.
SOURCE: http://govhealthit.com/articles/2009/03/30/arra-open-source.aspx
Questions surround health IT money March 23, 2009
Posted by gonzalezloumiet in FBI, HHS, HIT, IBM, Obama, Standards, Stimulus Plan.add a comment
By ERICA WERNER – 10 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — Here’s the best-case scenario for the government’s plans to spend $19 billion on computerized medical records: seamless communication among doctors and patients, and far fewer mistakes.
And the worst-case: $19 billion goes down the drain.
The medical industry is hoping for the first outcome, even while some fear the second, as the Health and Human Services Department tries to get hundreds of thousands of doctors to quit using paper files and join the digital age.
The money for the massive undertaking is in the economic stimulus bill that President Barack Obama signed into law last month.
“We need to get this right,” said Dr. David Kibbe, a senior adviser at the American Academy of Family Physicians. “Adoption of information technology for its own sake really is not the end game.”
The end game, Kibbe and others say, is for doctors’ offices and hospitals to be able to easily share patient information, something the vast majority can’t do today. That would cut down on mistaken and unnecessary procedures and give doctors faster access to more accurate information about patients’ medical histories and drug regimens.
The government’s history of undertaking major technological upgrades isn’t entirely encouraging.
The FBI spent four years and $170 million trying to modernize its paper-based case system, only to kill the project in 2005. Before that, the Federal Aviation Administration wasted more than $1 billion trying to overhaul the air traffic control system.
For advocates of the health technology transformation, the biggest fear is that the money could pay just for making paper records electronic, without giving doctors and hospitals much greater ability to connect.
“It’s not going to improve the decisions that either providers of care or patients make unless we get that information to move from the existing stovepipes,” said Zoe Baird, president of the Markle Foundation, which works to improve health care and national security.
The U.S. lags behind many other countries in adoption of electronic health records. A report in the New England Journal of Medicine, based on surveys from 2007 and 2008, found that 4 percent of physicians had extensive, fully functional electronic records systems, while 13 percent had more basic systems.
Typically, many systems aren’t connected to other physicians or hospitals. Dozens of vendors compete to sell proprietary systems that often cannot communicate with each other. Installation costs are prohibitively expensive for some doctors, particularly those in small practices.
Lawmakers and the Obama administration say they are aware of those problems and tried to write the stimulus legislation to address them. The bill envisions new standards to drive development of systems that are better able to communicate, and requires doctors and hospitals to show they’re going to be able to put those systems to “meaningful use.”
Computerizing records will “save money, improve the quality of care for patients and make our health care system more efficient,” HHS spokesman Nick Papas said. “We will move quickly and carefully to help implement this technology.”
But important details are missing from the legislation. A health secretary is not yet on the job, and other important officials are not in place. Just on Friday, the administration named the official who will serve as national coordinator for health information technology — Dr. David Blumenthal, a former Harvard Medical School professor who advised Obama during the presidential campaign and once worked for Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. Kennedy is chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
The stimulus bill specifies that $17 billion is to be spent in incentives through Medicare and Medicaid to nudge doctors and hospitals toward electronic record-keeping beginning in 2011. In 2015, financial penalties will start for doctors and hospitals if they haven’t done so.
What systems will be deemed acceptable? How will doctors and hospitals be able to show they will put such systems to meaningful use? Those questions remain largely unanswered.
Preliminary technological standards are due at the end of this year. That doesn’t give doctors, hospitals or technology companies much time to get systems up and running by 2011.
The bill also contains $2 billion for items such as health technology grants, training initiatives and state programs. The uncertainty surrounding this money has touched off heavy lobbying from interest groups hoping for a piece.
“The devils are in the details and we don’t know the details,” said Janet Marchibroda, head of the eHealth Initiative, a nonprofit that advocates for health improvements through technology.
Still, many health care professionals are optimistic about the prospects for a more connected health care system ahead.
“It will take time to get there,” said Tom Romeo, IBM’s vice president for government health care. “But everything’s in place to really make a huge jump forward now like it never has been before.”
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Health care experts warn of challenges for IT adoption March 19, 2009
Posted by gonzalezloumiet in American Enterprise Institute, EMR, HIT, nationwide health information exchange, Obama, Standards, Stimulus Plan, Trinity Health.add a comment
by Stephanie Condon
WASHINGTON–President Obama has called health information technology the “low-hanging fruit” of health care reform, but implementing the use of electronic medical records nationwide will be incredibly difficult, experts warned Wednesday, especially without larger health care reforms.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the use of electronic medical records could save the nation $12.5 billion over 10 years, and other analyses give more optimistic figures.
At a forum here on Wednesday, hosted by the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, health care providers and buyers attested to the improved quality of care and efficiencies that can result from the use of properly implemented electronic medical records. Yet without new policies to incentivize the use of health IT systems, the stimulus funds may go to waste, they said.
“We have an incredibly complex industry that doesn’t necessarily want to change,” said Joseph Swedish, president and CEO of Trinity Health, a nonprofit health care provider that includes 44 hospitals in its network. “I think the stimulus can prime the pump, but we have to recognize the daunting task ahead of us.”
TheTrinity Healthdirects health care providers to electronically record patients’ health information for “biosurveillance and public health” and “medical and clinical research” as part of a “nationwide system for the electronic use and exchange of health information.”
However, Swedish and other health care experts said providers will be reluctant to share data–or even use health IT systems in the first place–because of the pay-for-service structure and other institutional characteristics of the health industry.
Coordinators of a federal health care IT initiative have said developing a national health IT network will be extremely difficult and slow going because of the endless number of varying standards for medical health records applied in different states and localities.
Yet Benjamin Sasse, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said Wednesday that providers themselves–not a lack of consistent standards–are the biggest roadblock to a nationwide health information exchange.
“The standards problems are absolutely real, but if you want a sticky patient, why would you ever make a patient portable and available to your competitor?” he asked. “Most of the reasons we don’t have (health) IT have nothing to do with IT.”
“There are a lot of complexities with the sharing of data…I don’t envision in the near term being able to work with others.”
–Joseph Swedish, president and CEO of Trinity HealthTrinity Health, along with Kaiser and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, has one of the nation’s largest integrated, single-platform data management systems and is using its repository of information to adopt more evidence-based treatment. However, Swedish said, Trinity is not sharing data with Kaiser or other providers.
“There are a lot of complexities with the sharing of data,” he said. “I don’t envision in the near term being able to work with others.”
Trinity rolled out its health IT network in 2000 and incurred operational costs that greatly exceeded estimates, Swedish said, but also achieved more benefits than anticipated. Its hospitals, for instance, administer emergent medications 40 percent faster, and Trinity’s nurses have increased their bedside attendance of patients by 8 percent now that they spend less time on paperwork.
“We have witnessed lowering costs and what we believe is better quality,” he said. “We believe the investment is absolutely the right thing to do in the modern world we live in today.”
Still, he said, the process took years to implement, the benefits would not have been possible with just the IT–a change in culture and staff processes was also necessary.
The economic structure of the health industry does not only deter providers from sharing information, but also from simply adopting health IT in the first place, Sasse said.
“Health IT is (part of) a much larger debate around payment reform that would provide much higher care than the fee-for-service system does today,” he said.
SOURCE: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10199405-38.html
Information technology holds promise for advancing healthcare March 15, 2009
Posted by gonzalezloumiet in EMR, Health Care, HIT.add a comment
Scott Fisher / South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Obama’s administration is putting $19 billion toward electronic health record systems to improve treatment and lower costs. There’s still no consensus on standards or who should control the systems.
By Noam N. Levey
March 15, 2009
Reporting from Vero Beach, Fla. — A stethoscope with three tiny koalas dangling from his neck and eyeglasses perched on his nose, Dennis Saver looks every bit the family doctor as he steps into the examining room of his small practice on Florida’s Treasure Coast.
When Saver begins to examine his patient, however, the 56-year-old physician does something that four out of five doctors in America do not: He pulls out a computer.
Saver’s laptop, and the system behind it, put him on the cutting edge of what President Obama and many experts say is a critical step to improving the nation’s healthcare system while also reining in costs.
It is known as “Health IT,” an idea that promises to use information technology to cut medical errors, avoid unnecessary tests and procedures and identify better treatments. The Obama administration is betting that $19 billion of the economic stimulus package will spread the concept from coast to coast.
Saver and the nine other physicians in his practice decided to take the plunge 3 1/2 years ago.
Gone are tens of thousands of manila files that filled a big room in their office. Doing away with those has allowed the practice to cut its record-keeping staff from seven to three.
The office eliminated 2 1/2 more positions in the billing department because clerks no longer have to struggle over doctors’ handwritten notes.
In the examining room, Jim Culleton — an 84-year old retiree who cheerfully explained that Saver had saved his life three times — teased the doctor about his incessant tapping on the laptop.
“I liked it better when he talked into his tape recorder. Now, I don’t know what he’s saying about me,” Culleton said.
“Well, I don’t lose your chart anymore,” Saver countered. “And I don’t throw my back out hauling around your file.” The laptop also allows Saver to quickly check lab results — in Culleton’s case alleviating concerns about a possible infection, something that could be deadly for the recent heart attack victim.
And costly tests aren’t repeated because a lab result is lost or an image is misplaced, Saver said.
Thanks to warnings embedded in the electronic health record, or EHR, Saver can monitor his patients’ prescriptions to avoid harmful interactions. In case of a recall, he can check the database in minutes to find out whom to notify.
Elsewhere, there are even more promising signs.
Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, which installed an electronic record system five years ago, has all but eliminated errors in prescriptions, according to hospital officials.
In Hawaii, Kaiser Permanente reported a 26% drop in patient visits after the hospital giant implemented an electronic record system that allows doctors and patients to communicate more easily by telephone or e-mail for routine contacts.
And in New York, where the city has helped family practices install EHR systems, doctors are able to turn to their computers for guidance on recommended treatments.
The New York system, which links more than 800 providers, also allows public health officials to quickly tap patient data to track disease outbreaks and send doctors up-to-the-minute advisories.
“There are just huge opportunities here,” said Farzad Mostashari, an assistant health commissioner in New York.
But those opportunities have proved difficult to realize for most American doctors.
A big barrier to wider adoption has been the upfront expense. Installing electronic record systems can cost more than $30,000 per physician.
Even when doctors buy a system, they can’t be sure it will be compatible with other providers’ systems.
If Saver sends a patient to the hospital down the street or a specialist across the parking lot, someone in the office has to fax or e-mail the file. When the patient comes back, records generated elsewhere must then be attached to the patient’s electronic record back at Saver’s office. Three people do virtually nothing else all day.
The federal stimulus package contains grants and financial incentives for those who use electronic records.
But the Obama administration faces difficult decisions about ensuring that the billions of dollars of federal money are not wasted on systems that don’t work or cost too much. Also unresolved is access to patient data, an issue that raises questions about how researchers, pharmaceutical companies, insurers, even patients can use the electronic files.
By the end of the year, the Department of Health and Human Services is to develop a set of standards dictating not only what electronic health records should do, but who should control them and how.
All the while, government officials will have to navigate among a growing number of vendors maneuvering for a piece of the multibillion-dollar pot.
“We’re kind of at the Oklahoma land rush,” said Neal Patterson, founder and chief executive of Cerner, one of the country’s leading health information technology companies.
Patterson and other established vendors contend that Washington must require EHRs to provide a full range of services. Others, warning of Soviet-style central planning, argue for fewer standards to allow quicker adoption of less expensive, if less comprehensive systems.
“The standards are good enough. The technology is good enough,” Mostashari said. “We can’t waste any more time.”
noam.levey@latimes.com
SOURCE: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-health-it15-2009mar15,0,70229,full.story
CCHIT, HITSP have a future under stimulus package, leaders say March 12, 2009
Posted by gonzalezloumiet in CCHIT, HIT, HITSP.add a comment
March 11, 2009 | Diana Manos, Senior Editor
WASHINGTON – The chairmen of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology and Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel have weighed in on the future of their organizations under the new stimulus package.
At a Wednesday Web seminar hosted by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, CCHIT Chairman Mark Leavitt and HITSP Chairman John Halamka said their organizations still have value to the Obama administration.
The stimulus package promises to pay Medicare and Medicaid providers for “meaningful use” of certified healthcare IT beginning in 2011. Yet the law has unanswered questions left for interpretation by the new Health and Human Services secretary. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kan.) is awaiting Senate approval for that post.
Leavitt says he is confident that CCHIT will be the certification body that the HHS will specify, for a number of reasons. First, HHS recognition is the vehicle specified under the law for selecting a certification body, and the HHS has recognized CCHIT since 2006. (The stimulus package language could not name CCHIT specifically because naming a private organization would be considered an earmark, Leavitt said.)
Second, he said, with providers needing certification within the next year to qualify for stimulus package bonuses, there isn’t enough time for a new organization to be developed. “I have nothing against competition, but the program starts in 20 months and providers need to start their purchases right away to allow for testing and gathering of data for six months beforehand,” he said.
Leavitt said the CCHIT has delivered all its assigned goals and budgets on time, with a successful rate of acceptance in the market. The commission is seeing an influx of applications from electronic health record vendors to be certified under the most current standards available, he said.
With CCHIT-certified vendors comprising 75 percent of the market, Leavitt said the bigger question is which certification criteria will the new HHS secretary select – the 2008 criteria, standards adopted for 2009 or a new set of criteria.
“We have been through an incredible transformation,” he said. The $19 billion set aside to promote healthcare IT in the stimulus package is the fastest funding growth given any program since World War II, except for post-9/11 funding for Homeland Security.
“Our world has changed in a big way, but we should embrace it,” Leavitt said. “CCHIT is along for this rocket ride, and we will evolve to meet the needs.”
Halamka said HITSP has created “a substantial body of work” that will “radically simplify” standards harmonization going forward.
The new law calls for the development of a healthcare IT standards committee – an entirely new advisory body to the federal government. “The standards committee will provide a valuable function advising the federal government, but it won’t advise other stakeholders or the industry,” Halamka said. “I still believe there is useful work to be done by HITSP.”
Halamka is also banking on assignments already given to HITSP for 2009, including directives from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services to help with the comparative effectiveness component of the stimulus law. HITSP will also be helping the Social Security Administration to streamline automated disability data, he said.
HITSP is currently working on a service-oriented architecture that will include social networking applications, Halamka said.
Under the new stimulus bill, “I believe the healthcare IT policy may be new, but the standards will be a combination of new and evolved,” he said.
Halamka said he is keeping close watch over developments relating to HITSP’s future and recording them in his blog.
Halamka and Leavitt agreed that providers should not delay in adopting healthcare IT as soon as possible to cash in on bonuses provided in the stimulus package. Both said providers who implement healthcare IT with real intention will most likely have “meaningful use.”
SOURCE: http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/cchit-hitsp-have-future-under-stimulus-package-leaders-say
Gold rush on for health IT pioneers March 12, 2009
Posted by gonzalezloumiet in HIT.add a comment
Washington event showcases successes and reasons to be wary
By Nancy FerrisMar 11, 2009
The health IT stars showed up in Washington to share their delight at having a $19 billion grubstake provided for them in the stimulus legislation passed in February.
Although they gathered for the release of an issue of the journal Health Affairs devoted to health IT, they also were there to celebrate the opportunity just created by Congress.
“It is the beginning of a new era,” said Neal Patterson, chairman and chief executive officer of Cerner Corp., a large provider of health IT systems. He compared the situation to the land rush that opened up his birth state of Oklahoma for settlement by farmers and ranchers.
“It’s the land rush and the gold rush and the GI Bill of Rights all rolled into one,” said Dr. Mark Smith, president and CEO of the California HealthCare Foundation.
“It is now a given that implementation is going to happen,” said Dr. Jon White, director of the Health IT Portfolio at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Health IT pioneers from organizations such as Kaiser Permanente, the Geisinger Health System, the New York City Department of Health and the Dossia Consortium shared their stories and dispensed lessons learned during their presentations.
But speakers also issued caveats and warnings even as they looked forward to a period of unprecedented progress for health IT.
“Health information exchange will not occur through standards and certification alone,” said Dr. Farzad Mostashari, who directs the Primary Care Information Project in New York City. That project has installed e–health records in the offices of more than 1,000 physicians in low-income areas of the city.
He said most doctors need substantial assistance in installing their systems and learning to use them. “There is not enough money in the stimulus bill to get it done,” Mostashari said.
Cerner’s Patterson said nationwide exchange of health care records can’t occur without giving patients unique identification numbers, something Congress has forbidden the federal government to do. “We have to have a systematic way of knowing it’s the right person” whose records are being sent from one health care provider to another,” he said.
On the other hand, widespread implementation of EHRs will pave the way for the nation to save $500 billion a year, Patterson said. That is one of the largest estimates analysts have produced to date.
Dr. Robert Kolodner, national coordinator of health IT, warned that the $19 billion could be frittered away on health IT projects that do little to improve health care. “We have to make sure it doesn’t just disappear,” he said.
Lawmakers and taxpayers will demand accountability, predicted Dr. Carol Diamond, managing director of the Markle Foundation’s health program. She said they will want to see what they are getting in return for their investment.
About the Author
Nancy Ferris is senior editor of Government Health IT.
SOURCE: http://govhealthit.com/articles/2009/03/11/gold-rush-for-health-it-pioneers.aspx
