Again, in the last week, I have come across a few reports and news items which are worth passing on.
These include first:
Microsoft to buy Thai health software vendor
Microsoft has agreed to buy hospital administration software maker GCS of Thailand.
Dan Nystedt (IDG News Service) 30/10/2007 06:20:02
Microsoft on Monday said it has agreed to buy a Thai software vendor that specializes in hospital administration applications, and plans to sell the software in emerging markets.
Global Care Solutions (GCS) of Bangkok, Thailand, is Microsoft's third purchase of a health-care software vendor in the past 13 months, according to Peter Neupert, vice president for the Health Solutions Group at Microsoft. The group was formed two years ago and the purchase of GCS is one more step to building the Microsoft health-care business, he said.
GCS specializes in hospital software that takes care of patient scheduling, billing, clinical workflow, regulatory compliance and medical record-keeping. The privately held company has worked for years with Bumrungrad International Hospital, a facility made famous by its focus on catering to visiting tourists.
What makes GCS software special is the amount of specialized record keeping required by Bumrungrad. Doctors at the hospital see over 1.2 million patients each year, including 400,000 foreign patients from 190 countries, meaning varying language, insurance and billing data. Half of the 3,200 patients seen at Bumrungrad each day walk in without an appointment, yet GCS's scheduling software ensures patients wait an average of 17 minutes to see a doctor.
Continue reading here:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=214419639&eid=-255
This is an interesting move as it does mark something of a move by Microsoft away from provision of ‘infrastructure’ software (operating systems, database etc) to application software. As others have discovered Health Information System delivery, implementation and support is not all that easy – witness the number of vendors from 10 years ago that have been merged, taken over and so on.
Second we have:
Online prescriptions - no GP squiggles
Lindsay Murdoch in Darwin
October 31, 2007
THE days of doctors writing prescriptions in a chicken scratch decipherable only by experienced pharmacists are numbered.
Royal Darwin Hospital has developed Australia's first online medication management system where bedside laptops replace handwritten patient records.
Charles Kilburn, the hospital's head of pediatrics, said the system using wireless technology linked the doctor, nurse and pharmacist to the same electronic records.
"The system allows us to be in tune with prescribing practice, assists in compliance with best practice guidelines and minimises errors," Dr Kilburn said yesterday.
…..
The system, called Medchart, was developed specifically for drug prescriptions, clinical support and drug administration.
Northern Territory health officials said they were also leading the way in introducing a shared health record system, which has been undergoing trials in the Katherine region south of Darwin since 2004.
Under that system, information about patients is sent to a secure computer network, improving the co-ordination of health care across the Territory.
Read the complete article here:
It is good to see the NT moving along so well. I wonder why it is that the success with Shared Electronic Health Records has not been better publicised and NEHTA has not beaten a path there to spread the model nationally given development of a Shared EHR is their core mandate. It just might be that the level of success claimed is just a trifle exaggerated.
Further information is available from www.hatrix.com
Home-grown system for hospital
Royal Darwin Hospital is rolling out an online medication system developed by Canberra-based company Hatrix. Use of the MedChart system will be extended to replace all paper-based patient medication records in all Northern Territory hospitals over the next three years, claimed Stephen Moo, CIO for the hospital.
The system is used by patients' three primary carers — doctors, pharmacists, and nurses. "The tool was developed specifically for the complex clinical process of prescribing, pharmacy review, clinical decision support, and drug administration," Moo added.
Third we have:
Online Rx program helping cut errors
Big 3's e-drug plan boosts the use of generics while reducing glitches, analysis shows.
Sofia Kosmetatos / The Detroit News
A Big Three-driven effort to replace prescription pads with computers is significantly reducing patient risk from medication errors and helping increase generic drug use, according to an analysis released today by the Southeast Michigan ePrescribing Initiative.
Launched nearly two years ago, the first review of the initiative shows that it is not only protecting patients from the harmful consequences of medication errors, but is also helping them have better discussions with their doctors about medications at the time a prescription is written.
"The benefits of ePrescribing are overwhelming in terms of reducing medication errors, lowering prescription drug costs for patients and plans, and decreasing physician practices' administrative costs," said Marsha Manning, General Motors Corp.'s manager of Southeast Michigan Community Health Care Initiatives, in a statement.
Through the initiative, doctors access online software on computers in patient rooms to write the prescriptions, prompting discussions about generic alternatives, drug interactions and allergies at the time a prescription is written.
The results are savings on drug costs and fewer medical complications, doctors and coalition members say.
EPrescribing also eliminates doctors' handwriting as a source for error, and saves patients and doctors' offices time because the scripts are sent to pharmacies electronically.
The analysis of a sample of 3.3 million prescriptions showed:
• The ePrescribing technology sent alerts of severe or moderate drug interactions to doctors for about one-third of those prescriptions. Doctors changed or canceled 423,000 (or 41 percent) of those prescriptions.
• The technology informed doctors of more than 100,000 medication allergies, and doctors acted on 41,000 of these alerts.
• When an alert showed a drug was not on a formulary, the doctor changed the prescription to comply 39 percent of the time.
The initiative, involving the automakers, Henry Ford Health System, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and others, aimed to help doctors set up electronic prescribing in their offices.
The three automakers -- GM, Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC -- are involved because they think the initiative can cut down on their health care costs, which add up to billions of dollars.
So far, some 6.2 million prescriptions have been written by 2,500 doctors using ePrescribing technology, with more than 282,000 written each month.
The coalition plans to extend the initiative through March 2008.
Continue reading the details here:
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071029/LIFESTYLE03/710290363
For more information, there is also more detail available at medco.com.
This provides compelling evidence of just how helpful electronic prescribing with decision support can be in improving clinical practice. There should have been much more publicity of this important result.
Fourth we have:
Patient Safety Institute folds due to lack of funding
By: Jean DerGurahian/ HITS staff writer
Story posted: October 29, 2007 - 5:59 am EDT
The outlook for the creation of a self-sustaining national health information network dimmed after a decision by the Patient Safety Institute to close its doors.
The Patient Safety Institute ceased operations last week after six years, citing a lack of investment opportunities to test its locally grown information network on a national scale.
But the institute isn't the only health information network to fold this year. Several regional information exchanges could not sustain funding despite claiming to have strong participant support, and recent closures in Portland, Ore., and Pennsylvania suggest organizations haven't yet proved to the healthcare industry the need for everyone to be able to exchange data.
A sustainable business model is necessary if the healthcare industry wants to move forward with improvement—something that has been difficult to prove for physicians, said Bill Hersh, professor and chairman of the department of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology at the Oregon Health & Science University, Portland. "We have a poor business case for small practices to adopt electronic health records, since they pay the cost and others get the benefits. Same for the Patient Safety Institute and same for RHIOs. Those who get the benefit must be the ones who pay the cost,” he said in an e-mail.
The institute's technology was similar to that used by many other groups attempting to leverage networks, said Beth Just, president and chief executive officer of Just Associates, a consulting firm based in Centennial, Colo. Her company works with healthcare systems to implement patient-identity management across differing medical records. Through her firm, she works closely with the Colorado regional health information organization, a statewide information network initiative.
Continue reading here:
http://www.modernhealthcare.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071029/FREE/310290002/1029/FREE
This is an important article that reviews why one Health Information Network failed to achieve financial viability. It shows there is not yet developed a fool proof formula to have such initiatives be successful.
Lastly we have:
US Makes New Push on E-Health Records
By KEVIN FREKING
Associated Press Writer
5:54 PM PDT, October 29, 2007
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is recruiting about 1,200 doctors nationally to remove the paperwork from their medical practice in return for higher Medicare payments.
Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt billed the project Monday as one of the administration's most important steps yet toward meeting President Bush's goal of nationwide adoption of electronic health records by 2014.
Medicare will pay the physicians extra for completing tasks online, such as when ordering prescriptions or recording the results of lab tests. The highest payments will go to those physicians who most aggressively use the technology and who score the highest in an annual evaluation.
Many health analysts believe widespread use of electronic health records will reduce medical errors and could potentially slow soaring health care expenses. Yet, only about 10 percent of doctors in solo or small-group practices use such records. Upfront costs for putting in place such computer systems can range from $20,000 to $40,000.
Continue reading here:
It is good to see that the US has recognised the need to financial incentives to encourage increased effective computer use in ambulatory care (general and office practice). In Australian a similar program is in place, but in my view the effort required to receive the financial incentives has been set so low that it is not clear just how much value for money Australia is receiving for the expenditure. The US approach seems designed to avoid that problem.
All in all some interesting material to the week!
More next week.
David.
3 comments:
Microsoft has decisively entered the Health Information Systems sector.
It has the capacity, the strength, and the resilience, to harness formidable resources and focus them on some of the most elusive and difficult problems in health informatics; problems which have confronted governments and health software developers everywhere - for a very long time.
Throughout the developed world, the Governments of America, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and elsewhere, are spending billions of dollars on health information technology solutions. In doing so they strive to achieve greater efficiencies in the delivery of health services in thousands of highly complex, multi-departmental hospital enterprises, and further afield in the primary and community health care sectors.
Their common aim is to achieve integration and interoperability between multiple software solutions, and standardisation of clinical information exchange across every sector of the health system.
That Microsoft has chosen to enter the fray should be applauded. Its journey will be extremely challenging.
To succeed it will first need to acquire some core technology solutions and further develop them. These will need to meet very comprehensive selection criteria and be well established in their health domain. Significant steps in that direction have already been taken.
Secondly, it will need to skillfully cultivate and nurture other health informatics solution developers, whilst preserving their independence. Such arms length nurturing will enable these developers to progressively embrace the ‘core’ solutions, whilst enabling Microsoft to use their expertise to address some of the more politically turbulent, multi-faceted, highly fragmented domains that comprise the Primary Care, Community Health and Aged Care sectors.
In time, Microsoft may well be the one that brings it all together.
Let's hope you are right. It is so logical for Microsoft to look at exploiting its footprint in health. If it really got serious we might just see some real progress being made. They couldn’t do any worse than what HealthConnect have done.
In theory NEHTA should be pleased by these developments. In theory maybe, but in practice will Microsoft do NEHTA's bidding or will the shoe be on the other foot?
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