McClellan, Health IT Leaders Discuss More Effective Use of Health IT
in Half-Day Session with Far-Reaching Look Ahead
at Promotion, Models, and Policy Implications
Webcast, Podcast, Transcripts Available
In an excellent half-day session on May 14, 2010, Mark McClelland, MD, PhD, Director, Engleberg Center for Health Care Reform at Brookings, led a series of discussions among leaders of Health IT focusing on how to use the same data that is being collected, and will increasingly be collected, in patient care to help improve the health care system beyond the individual patient.
Brookings Events Page: “Making ‘Enhanced Use’ of Health Information”
Includes: Archived Webcast
Three Audio Sections
Issues Brief pdf (under Event Materials)
Transcripts
Summary
Starting off the discussion on promoting use of Electronic Health Records, Farzad Mostshari, Deputy Director, Policy and Programs, Office of National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT, said the ONC always started from the end goal, as he laid out key principles including keeping data as close to the source as possible and data “collected once and used many times.” When asked how meaningful use was going, he answered with one word “Fantastic” and a broad smile, and then pointed out that focus on quality was the core of “meaningful use.” (See John Halamka’s blog for a list of the principles Mostashari laid out.)
When it comes to promoting the use of Electronic Health Records, John Halamka, CIO, Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Amanda Parsons, who oversees New York City’s Primary Care Information Project (PCIP), agreed “it’s about the workflow:” don’t be disruptive to the physician’s delivery of care to the patient, while at the same time changing the way they work/think to take best advantage of the data and the wisdom that electronic health records and information exchange can offer. As Parons stressed “don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good,” one of the constant refrains of EHR and Health IT evangelists.
The next panel titled “Compelling Models of Enhanced Use of Health Information,” shared such models including those conducted by Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania described by James Walker, chief health information officer of Geisinger; the multi-state metro Cincinnati HealthBridge described by Robert Steffel, president and CEO of HealthBridge; South Carolina HIE described by David Patterson who oversees the HIE along with the state’s Medicaid Director; Wisonsin Health Exchange described by Michael Raymer of Microsoft; and Kaiser Permanante’s Institute for Health Research described by its senior director John Steiner. Geisinger recently won a Beacon Community award from the ONC to extend the kind of Health IT structure it uses to support patients within its IDN to patients and physicians outside its delivery system.
“Implications for Policy” looked ahead with views from White Office of Science and Technology; Carol Diamond of Markle Foundation; Landen Bain of Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium Healthlink Program, and Andrew Weber, National Business Coalition on Health.
In answer to a question about what can be done on a policy end to help physicians think and work with their patients differently for enhanced use of Health IT tools, Diamond said “The key from my perspective in terms of giving them the capacity to use these tools in a way that provides value to them is to not make quality and research a compliance exercise, but to make it part of the way care is delivered. And the only way I know how to do that is to give them the tools at the point of care while they’re with the patient and give them the flexibility to use those tools towards common goals.” Parsons agreed with another panelist when she added “Frankly, it just has to be an alignment of health reform and reimbursement rate.”
Bain may have summed up the impact of the day’s discusssions when he added he was glad that the conversation at Brookings had focused on workflow and business processes: ”I really am encouraged that we’ve moved off of what I call data blindness, where all you can think about is just data and this abstract quality that you want to get a hold of.”
McClelland’s Issue Brief “Using Information Technology to Support Better Health Care: One Infrastructure with Many Uses” (link to Brookings event page) provides an insightful perspective on Health IT and its impact on healthcare and health reform, as well as a good summary of what he described in his opening remarks.
