“The crisis in Flint, Michigan would have been much worse if we were still on paper records,” said Sylvia Matthews Burwell, Secretary of Health & Human Services, to open HIMSS16. The story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician at Hurley Medical Center in Flint, proactively analyzed the electronic records of her pediatric patients, determining they had higher levels of lead than normal, shows the power of health IT in action.
The power is not in the health IT alone, but in the use of IT to drive knowledge and insight when physicians like Dr. Hanna-Tisha can do the kind of analysis that leads to proactive interventions for patients and for a community.
This story reflects a few key themes that HfS observed in this year’s HIMSS conference, including:
- Enabling Physicians: To achieve the triple aim of better health, a better care experience, and at a lower cost, physicians are the critical lynchpin, and so the healthcare industry needs to address the physician and caregiver experience as well. The industry needs to do a better job of making data accessible and actionable through the use if IT. To engage clinicians in the effective use of technology to drive results, an increasing number of hospitals are bringing doctors and nurses onto the IT leadership team as Chief Medical Information Officers (CMIOs) and Chief Nurse Information Officers (CNIOs). Over 70% of respondents in the HIMSS 2016 Leadership Survey indicated their organization has a clinical IT leader to help put the IT in a business context and drive results including: increased patient satisfaction, improved patient outcomes, enhanced operational efficiency, and improved physician satisfaction.
- “Person Centricity”: While patient medical needs must be addressed and managed, the industry needs to be looking at individuals as people, not just as patients. Today’s population health and care management tools need to be used to bring together socioeconomic and geographic data to understand, engage and support the “whole person.” This comprehensive approach could be through medical treatment alone, or in combination with nutrition guides, automated reminders, or even transportation to appointments or provision of child care.
- “Set the Data Free”: We need to unlock data so doctors can be more informed and people can be more active participants in their health and care. As Secretary Burwell said, “Healthcare data is the language to use to tell the story of your health.” It connects doctors and hospitals and communities to work together for one patient or patient populations. Not just physicians, but people also should be able to access and more easily and securely share the data to connect the people in their health story. HIPAA cannot be used as a broad excuse for much longer. Secretary Burwell announced an effort to clarify HIPAA regulation so that it becomes easier to understand and less of a barrier to accessing and sharing information. It might be easier, though, to clarify government regulation than to address “greed.” There are instances where organizations are looking to charge fees for access, which creates another barrier. As one speaker shared, within the same hospital system, one clinic wanted to charge another for access to patient data.
- Interoperability: Although the use of electronic health records supersedes paper now, data in one record is not easily accessed, transferred, or exchanged online, which is critical for coordinating effective health and care. A group of companies—representing 90% of electronic health records used by U.S. hospitals—including health IT vendors such as Cerner and EPIC, healthcare providers like Ascension Health, and industry associations such as the American Medical Association are leading a pledge to agree not to block information exchange and to “open” systems with APIs to allow communication. This effort is intended to enable data access regardless of the source. HHS has grants available for developing apps with APIs that allow consumers or doctors to pull information from digital repositories and make it actionable at the point of care.
HfS predicts that next year, at HIMSS17, we will see a “progress check” on physician and patient engagement, data accessibility, and system interoperability, and a stronger focus on precision medicine. Now that data is in the systems and once it can be exchanged, aggregated, and accessed more easily by physicians and patients, we can focus on how to use it more effectively to tailor care to specific individual needs.
