Again there has been just a heap of stuff arrive this week.
First we have:
'We don't care how you accomplish critical tasks, so long as you do so with electronic technology'
National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Dr. David Blumenthal spoke with The Wall Street Journal's Bob Davis about how he plans to convince hospitals and doctors to computerize their records. Below is an edited transcript.
* * *
The Wall Street Journal: What's the potential for health information technology?
Dr. Blumenthal: There's no way to transform the health-care system without information technology. Today we use the same technology for recording health-care information that Hippocrates used. It defies logic that we will be able to get the best out of health information with sheaths of paper flying around by snail mail.
WSJ: What are the potential cost savings?
Dr. Blumenthal: There are disputes about how much we'll save and how we'll show the benefits of health IT. The combination of an improved payment system, an improved education system about health IT and improved governance of the health care system that prioritizes quality and efficiency together with health information technology is where the real payoff is.
WSJ: How much money does the stimulus bill set aside from health IT?
Dr. Blumenthal: The stimulus bill sets aside $2 billion for the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology to lay the groundwork for the adoption of health information. It also creates Medicare and Medicaid payment incentives for physicians who are "meaningful users" of health information technology. There will also be penalties for those who aren't "meaningful users'" of health IT.
Estimates of the cost of those incentives and penalties vary. No one can tell you exactly how many physicians will use electronic health care records. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal government would spend $29 billion on incentives, but it would produce savings of $12 billion. Other saving estimates run higher.
More here (subscription required):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124404155221081477.html
It seems the US administration gets it. Sadly not so in OZ!
Second we have:
Friday, June 12, 2009
A Boston hospital aims to collect genome information from all consenting patients.
By Emily Singer
Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) has announced plans to collect blood samples for genetic analysis from all consenting patients and then feed that information into a large database, allowing scientists to analyze patients' genomes alongside detailed medical histories. The project aims to take advantage of the immense amount of patient information available in the hospital's electronic medical-record system, which is one of the most sophisticated in the country and houses a level of medical detail missing from most large-scale genetic studies of disease. The project could also serve as a model for how to incorporate genomic information into both electronic medical records and clinical care.
A growing number of both academic and privately funded efforts aim to link patients' genomes with their symptoms, but the BWH project is unique in its scope. As an academic medical center affiliated with Harvard Medical School, BWH serves a wide variety of patients, with nearly 400,000 routine visits, 58,000 emergency-room visits, and approximately 46,000 in-patient admissions per year. Researchers ultimately aim to open the project to the entire Partner's Healthcare System, a local network of hospitals and medical centers that sees hundreds of thousands of patients.
While new genomics technologies have allowed scientists to identify hundreds of genetic variants that raise the risk for different diseases, the role that these variants play in individuals is still unclear, as is how to use the information to tailor treatment and prevention strategies for individual patients.
Much more here:
http://beta.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22799/
There is little doubt this is just the beginning of the huge and serious work to discover as many links as possible between genetics and illness. This will transform medicine over the next decades I believe.
Third we have:
Can Information Technology Cut Healthcare Costs?
Posted 12 June 2009 @ 10:15 am ET
As U.S. President Barack Obama refocuses efforts on universal healthcare, the burdensome question of how to fund it all returns. But without a handle on the rising costs in the current healthcare system, the possibility for new coverage seems a pipedream. A recent report from the Board of Trustees of Social Security and Medicare indicates that the trust fund supporting the federal Medicare program will be insolvent in 2019—a full seven years sooner than previously projected.
Additional statistics indicate just how dire the healthcare cost situation is becoming. According to figures from the White House, “the U.S. spent approximately $2.2 trillion on healthcare in 2007, or $7,421 per person—nearly twice the average of other developed nations.” Statistics from the Congressional Budget Office estimate that by 2025, “one out of every four dollars in our national economy will be tied up in the health system.”
With U.S. healthcare expenses and health insurance premiums skyrocketing in response, the current administration and Congress are turning their efforts to tech implementation in the sector as a way to curb expense. President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan allots $19 billion for health information technology, in an effort to push common protocols in the space, including interoperable electronic health records that could easily move between clinicians, diagnostic facilities, hospitals, and pharmacies.
A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) cost estimate released in March 2009 detailed that the stimulus plan, officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, provides funding for expanded use of health IT—an effort to “reduce on-budget direct spending for health benefits by Medicare, Medicaid, and Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) programs by $12.4 billion” over the 2009-2019 period. While implementation of the health IT provisions in the stimulus plan would account for increases in the “on-budget deficits by a total of $18.3 billion over the 2009-2019 period,” according to the CBO, “it would increase the unified budget deficit over that period by an estimated $17 billion.” The CBO reports that the offset in spending increases will come from the reductions in Medicare spending in later years, resulting in a savings after 2014. The added benefit, says the CBO, is the accelerated use of cost-saving IT bleeding over into the private insurance sector, resulting in lower health insurance premiums for employers.
Very full reporting continues here:
http://www.ibtimes.com/contents/20090612/can-information-technology-healthcare-costs.htm
The discussion continues!
Fourth we have:
June 13, 2009
Patient Money
By WALECIA KONRAD
Brandon Sharp, a 37-year-old manager at an oil and gas company in Houston, has never had any real health problems and, luckily, he has never stepped foot in an emergency room. So imagine his surprise a few years ago when he learned he owed thousands of dollars worth of emergency-service medical bills.
Mr. Sharp, as it turned out, was a victim of a fast-growing crime known as medical identity theft.
At the time, Mr. Sharp was about to get married and buy his first home. Before applying for a mortgage he requested a copy of his credit report. That is when he found he had several collection notices under his name for emergency room visits throughout the country.
“There was even a $19,000 bill for a Life Flight air ambulance service in some remote location I’d never heard of,” said Mr. Sharp, who made this unhappy discovery in 2003. “I had emergency room bills from places like Bowling Green, Kan., where I’ve never even visited. I’m still cleaning up the mess.”
The last time federal data on the crime was collected, for a 2007 report, more than 250,000 Americans a year were victims of medical identity theft. That number has almost certainly increased since then, because of the increased use of electronic medical records systems built without extensive safeguards, said Pam Dixon, executive director of the nonprofit World Privacy Forum and author of a report on medical identity theft.
And uncountable, Ms. Dixon said, are the people who do not yet know they are victims. They may not know that their medical information has been tampered with for months or even years until, as in Mr. Sharp’s case, it shows up in collections on a credit report.
Medical identity theft takes many guises. In Mr. Sharp’s case, someone got hold of his name and Social Security number and used them to receive emergency medical services, which many hospitals are obliged to provide whether or not a person has insurance. Mr. Sharp still does not know whether he fell victim to one calamitous perp who ended up in several emergency rooms or a ring of accident-prone conspirators.
In another variant of the crime, someone can use stolen insurance information, like the basic member ID and group policy number found on insurance cards, to impersonate you — and receive everything from a routine physical to major surgery under your coverage. This is surprisingly easy to do, because many doctors and hospitals do not ask for identification beyond insurance information.
Much more here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/health/13patient.html?_r=1
This is a possible problem here in Australia that we need to make sure we manage by engineering the NEHTA IHI etc to handle such fraud properly.
Fifth we have:
By Joseph Conn / HITS staff writer
Posted: June 15, 2009 - 11:00 am EDT
Before passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in February, when the words “meaningful use” appeared together, did anyone even notice?
Now, however, a Google search on “meaningful use” produces about 179,000 hits, with the top 101 links heading to Web sites, congressional testimonies, white papers, magazine articles, blog ruminations and prospective definitions—all addressing the phrase exclusively in a healthcare information technology context.
Dangle, as Congress did, some $34 billion in federal IT subsidies in front of the healthcare industry, and make those payments contingent on a provider’s ability to meet federally set thresholds for meaningful use, and you wind up, as we have, with the 21st century healthcare IT version of the Y2K sensation.
Kent Gale, president and founder of healthcare IT market researcher KLAS Enterprises, Orem, Utah, didn’t miss the opportunity to try and divine the import of the meaningful-use doctrine from a market survey.
Last week, KLAS issued a 93-page report based on results from its own survey of provider organizations using electronic health-record systems. The report tries to determine which vendors’ systems might give their provider customers the best chance at meeting Gale’s own estimate of what the meaningful-use standard might require. (An official HHS description of meaningful use, which is expected to supplement the one already included in the stimulus bill, is due to be released soon.)
Much more here:
http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20090615/REG/306159980
Work is proceeding apace on this – we can expect to see some clear definitions out over the next few weeks. Meanwhile – with so much money at stake – discussion goes on.
A glimpse into the sorts of things being considered is found here:
First Look at 'Meaningful Use'
HDM Breaking News, June 16, 2009
Quoting from this report we read:
The workgroup's initial recommendations include 22 objectives--most covering inpatient and outpatient care--for EHRs in 2011. These include, among others:
* Use CPOE for all order types including medications;
* Implement drug-drug, drug-allergy and drug-formulary checks;
* Maintain an up-to-date problem list;
* Generate and transmit permissible prescriptions electronically;
* Maintain an active medication allergy list;
* Send reminders to patients per their preference for preventive and follow-up care;
* Document a progress note for each encounter;
* Provide patients with an electronic copy or electronic access to clinical information such as lab results, problem list, medication lists and allergies;
* Provide clinical summaries for patients for each encounter;
* Exchange key clinical information among providers of care;
* Perform medication reconciliation at relevant encounters;
* Submit electronic data to immunization registries where required and accepted;
* Provide electronic submissions of reportable lab results to public health agencies;
* Provide electronic surveillance data to public health agencies according to applicable law and practice; and
* Comply with federal and state privacy/security laws and the fair data sharing practices in HHS' Nationwide Privacy and Security Framework, released in December 2008.
Much more here:
http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/meaningful_use-38487-1.html
For more information, click here. Scroll down and click on "meaningful use preamble" and "meaningful use matrix."
Certainly a list that makes more sense than the pathetic ePIP program.
More here also:
http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/content/234609/topic/WS_HLM2_TEC/Meaningful-Use-Defined-by-HIT-Policy-Committee.html
Carrie Vaughan, for HealthLeaders Media, June 16, 2009
Sixth we have:
By Steve Lohr Update | 12:33 p.m. Clarifying G.E. comments on initial funding for health-records loan program in post and headline. While it is setting aside $2 billion for financing of health information technology, its initial commitment for loans to accelerate adoption of electronic health records is $100 million.
G.E. Capital has mostly been a headache for its parent company, General Electric, since the financial crisis hit last fall. But on Monday, the finance arm will be putting its muscle behind G.E.’s health care unit as it tries to grab a hefty slice of the market for electronic health records, a prime target for economic stimulus spending by the Obama administration.
G.E. is announcing that it will offer doctors and hospitals loans that will carry no interest until the institutions begin receiving government money, typically in 2012. The loans, of course, will be to buy G.E.’s Centricity electronic health records — either as conventional personal-computer software or as a Web-based offering.
The bridge-loan plan addresses one big worry for many doctors who are interested in taking advantage of the government incentives (up to $40,000 per physician over a few years) to make the move to digital patient records: a shortage of upfront capital.
But the other uncertainty is that the government has not yet defined the technology standards for what will be “qualified” electronic health records. The definition will presumably include being able to share data and as well as automated reporting of certain measurements of health care quality.
Much more here:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/ge-offers-loans-for-e-health-record-purchases/
An interesting approach indeed to gaining market share and facilitating EHR adoption.
More about this here:
http://caas.tmcnet.com/topics/caas-saas/articles/58016-ge-waits-with-healthcare-tech-industry-e-medical.htm
June 15, 2009
Seventh we have:
Thursday, June 11, 2009
by George Lauer, iHealthBeat Features Editor
Scrutiny from mainstream media and volleys of reaction in the blogosphere last month aimed a new kind of spotlight at health IT. Many, especially those involved on the consumer side of the issue, welcome the light, but they also warn against being blinded by it.
The Washington Post published two stories in May examining the health IT industry's role in formulating the HITECH Act and other parts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that direct billions of federal dollars toward health IT. The stories also examine various links between interests and personnel among industry groups, the Obama administration and Congress.
Motives Beyond Money
The first story detailed how the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society "worked closely with technology vendors, researchers and other allies in a sophisticated, decade-long campaign to shape public opinion and win over Washington's political machinery."
Consumer advocates don't argue with that premise, but they do argue with the implication that the only motive was money.
"The vendor community -- all [health IT] companies and the various organizations they've created -- has played the largest role in [health] IT policy over the past five to six years, so yes, the industry has had the dominant role in driving [health] IT," Steven Findlay, senior health policy analyst for Consumers Union, said.
"I don't quibble with the premise of the Washington Post article -- that HIMSS helped push in the halls of Congress and the White House the notion that a lot of money would help spark much more rapid adoption," Findlay said, adding, "I agree with them -- that more money was needed. Surely more money than the Bush policies provided."
More here:
http://www.ihealthbeat.org/Features/2009/Spotlight-on-HIMSS-Welcomed-But-Shaded-by-Perspective.aspx
MORE ON THE WEB (Here)
Continuing discussion of the lobbying process around the decisions in the US to promote Health IT.
Eighth we have:
HDM Breaking News, June 15, 2009
American Medical Alert Corp. has introduced a medication dispensing and adherence verification system for use in patient's homes.
The MedSmart system, a clam-shell shaped device, activates visual and audio alarms at the time medication is to be taken, according to the Oceanside, N.Y.-based vendor.
.....
More information is available at healthyagingsolutions.com.
--Joseph Goedert
Full article here:
http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/home_health-38477-1.html?ET=healthdatamanagement:e908:100325a:&st=email
Sounds like a useful service for selected patients.
Ninth we have:
By Calvin Azuri, TMCnet Contributor
More than 45 health departments in the U.S. use technology from reputed software developer Orion Health to identify at an early stage, and react quickly to, contagious and potentially hazardous diseases and other public health exigencies.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other central authorities are now persuading more and more state health agencies to enhance their crisis management, response and health monitoring mechanisms to give access to vital information in an emergency reaction or in analyzing any spikes in health issues.
Orion’s ready to use software, the Rhapsody Integration Engine, available on counters of most software stores, has been instrumental in easing off some of the burden from the shoulders of healthcare enterprises by enabling a smooth framework for making sense of hundreds and thousands of bits of medical information.
The software helps compile medical data about a broad range of medical conditions, including recent outbreaks like the swine flu, from a wide cross-section of patients on a daily basis. The collection process, often carried out by several scattered healthcare organizations from unorganized sources, is streamlined to a precise and quicker one by Rhapsody. Rhapsody processes thousands of feeds from these organizations everyday and then it safely provides the data to public health decision makers using their PHINMS (Public Health Information Messaging Service).
More here:
http://healthcare.tmcnet.com/topics/healthcare/articles/57919-us-health-departments-using-orion-health-technology-disease.htm
Certainly one piece of software that suits the times !
Tenth we have:
12 Jun 2009
Hospitals in Norway, Italy and Spain have been linked together using an advanced video conferencing system enabling them to share real-time images of surgery for training and diagnosis.
The systems were linked as part of a demonstration at the Terena Networking Conference in Malaga this week, intended to show how similar telemedicine systems could improve healthcare across Europe
St Olav’s Hospital in Norway, Monaldi Hospital in Italy and the Hospital Clinica in Barcelona, Spain, were connected to each other via their hosts and the pan-European GÉANT academic network to the conference.
Staff at each of the hospitals provided a virtual tour of how endoscopic surgery can be transmitted for training across the GÉANT network, operated by the Dante research organisation.
Dai Davies, general manager of Dante, said: “Telemedicine has the power to improve medical training and patient care across Europe.
More here:
http://www.ehealtheurope.net/news/4931/european_hospitals_share_real-time_videos
Obviously a good way to share skills and expertise for less cost overall that air-travel etc.
Eleventh for the week we have:
By Andis Robeznieks / HITS staff writer
Posted: June 15, 2009 - 11:00 am EDT
The American Medical Association is set to decide policy on a physician's obligations in the event of a computer security breach, whether the federal incentives and subsidies to buy electronic health records constituted a pay-for-performance scheme, and several other information technology issues over the next three days at its annual House of Delegates meeting being held in Chicago.
Split into eight reference committees, delegates on Sunday considered more than 200 reports and resolutions including one on supporting the use of open-source software and others on opposing penalizing physicians who don't use IT.
The reference committees will draft reports on each item and include recommendations to either support, oppose, support or oppose with amendments, or refer them back to the board of trustees for further study. The recommendations will then be voted on by the 500-plus members of the entire House of Delegates over the next three days.
More here (registration required):
http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20090617/REG/306179993
This is certainly an area where clear policy will be needed.
Twelfth we have:
June 12, 2009 | Bernie Monegain, Editor
GREEN BAY, WI – President Barack Obama on Thursday turned the spotlight on healthcare IT leaders Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City and Geisinger Health in rural Philadlephia.
"We have to ask why places like the Geisinger Health system in rural Pennsylvania, Intermountain Health in Salt Lake City or communities like Green Bay can offer high-quality care at costs well below average, but other places in America can't," Obama told a packed gymnasium at Green Bay Southwest High School.
"We need to identify the best practices across the country, learn from the success and replicate that success elsewhere," he said. "And we should change the warped incentives that reward doctors and hospitals based on how many tests or procedures they prescribe, even if those tests or procedures aren't necessary or result from medical mistakes. Doctors across this country did not get into the medical profession to be bean counters or paper pushers, to be lawyers or business executives. They became doctors to heal people. And that's what we must free them to do."
More here:
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/intermountain-geisinger-share-spotlight-obama-talk
This is a major question indeed. We can only hope our NHHRC will have some accurate answers when it reports in a week or two.
Thirteenth we have:
Patients want health technology rules to give them more access to their data
Dave deBronkart has a rather unique perspective on the health information technology debate: He's a cancer survivor, “e-Patient Dave” blogger and a believer in the power of technology to improve health care for patients, providers and the government.
“I am a high-tech guy," he said. "And I see what is happening in technology as a big opportunity to benefit patients and reduce costs.”
DeBronkart is one of the founders of a movement to put patients and consumers in the center of health care reform and health IT. He and other advocates are trying to get patient-centric principles into the Obama administration’s upcoming regulations for spending $19 billion in incentives for health information technology. The question is: Is giving more power to patients too big a pill to swallow?
The goals of patient-centric approaches are to give patients a more active role in their care — including giving them greater access to their medical data in digital form. Vendors are applying patient-centric ideas to electronic personal health records, systems that store someone’s health history in one place in digitized form. Those systems could eventually be involved in regional and national health information exchanges.
Personal health records, which patients create and use voluntarily, would seem to complement the Health and Human Services Department’s development of standards and policies for certified electronic health records, patient records created and shared by doctors and hospitals. In May, HHS’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONCHIT) began drafting regulations to reward providers who show "meaningful use" of health IT.
More here:
http://fcw.com/articles/2009/06/15/topic-a-patient-centric-health-record.aspx
An obviously important perspective I believe.
Fourteenth we have:
Posted by Marianne Kolbasuk McGee @ 01:39:PM | Jun,16, 2009
Cloud models are starting to provide an attractive option for large and influential regional medical centers to get lots of small, local, laggard doctor offices trading in their paper patient files for electronic medical records. Are there clouds in your forecast?
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), together with its Beth Israel Deaconess Physicians Organization (BIDPO), is just one of a handful of large and prestigious health care organizations in the country helping small doctor offices in their region (in this case, the Boston area) to deploy e-medical record systems.
A cloud model allows these doctor offices to use software to manage their practices and patient data, but the servers are located remotely and supported by BIDMC and Concordant, a services provider. BIDMC is covering about 85% of the non-hardware expenses for the practices to deploy the eClinicalWorks software, and the doctor offices pay a monthly subscription fee of between $500 and $600 for support.
A similar cloud plan is also being used by University Health System of Eastern Carolina to get small doctor practices in rural North Carolina using 21st century technology, says CIO Stuart James. "Most providers can't afford to hire IT people to keep these systems running," he says. "This keeps the costs down."
The loosening nearly two years ago of federal Stark anti-kickback regulations allows hospitals to donate e-health record software and services to doctors.
More here:
http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/blog/archives/2009/06/is_that_a_cloud.html
It will be interesting to see how this plays out – especially given the possibly privacy and security implications.
Fifteenth we have:
HDM Breaking News, June 15, 2009
Labeling the current healthcare system a "ticking time bomb," President Barack Obama assured some 4000 physicians and their staff attending the American Medical Association's annual meeting in Chicago that he would not let it explode in their faces.
In an hour-long speech describing his administration's intentions to reform health care, Obama drew multiple bursts of applause punctuated by a few moments of awkward silence.
On the one hand, Obama went to great lengths to debunk the idea that he is single-payer, big-government advocate. "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period." Yet, he also made it clear that the industry needs to clean up its act, that the country can no longer tolerate a fee-for-service system that rewards quantity more than quality.
"A lot of people in this room know what I am talking about," he said, shifting into a tone suggesting a stern parent scolding an errant child. "It is a model that rewards the quantity of care rather than the quality of care. It is a model that has taken the pursuit of medicine from a profession--a calling--to a business."
More here:
http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/AMA-38484-1.html?ET=healthdatamanagement:e909:100325a:&st=email
Never was a truer word spoken!
There is more on this here:
By Andis Robeznieks / HITS staff writer
Posted: June 16, 2009 - 11:00 am EDT
Fixing the nation's healthcare system will begin with implementing electronic health records, President Barack Obama told the American Medical Association's House of Delegates yesterday.
"How do we permanently bring down costs and make quality affordable healthcare available to every single American?" Obama asked. "First, we need to upgrade our medical records by switching from a paper to an electronic system of record-keeping. We've already begun to do this with an investment we made as part of our recovery act. It simply doesn't make sense that patients in the 21st century are still filling out forms with pens on papers that have to be stored away somewhere. As Newt Gingrich has rightly pointed out—and I don't quote Newt Gingrich that often—we do a better job tracking a Fed Ex package in this country than we do tracking patients' health records.
Right click to download a podcast of President Barack Obama's address to the AMA. (55MB file, 60-minute audio)
See here:
http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20090616/REG/306169993
Again registration required.
Sixteenth we have:
By Joseph Conn / HITS staff writer
Posted: June 16, 2009 - 11:00 am EDT
Members of a newly formed not-for-profit organization to promote free and open-source software development in the healthcare industry will likely join in the discussion today during a "town call" hosted by the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology.
The virtual and physical meeting of CCHIT, the first of two scheduled on successive days in Washington, is specifically aimed at addressing the open-source community’s concerns regarding CCHIT certification of their software products in the new IT era of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Open-source community members and leaders of CCHIT, which is a federally supported organization testing and certifying electronic health-record systems, first met in April in Chicago. Among complaints aired by the open-source members were that CCHIT is dominated by and favored developers of proprietary healthcare IT systems, it is too expensive, and its testing procedures and criteria are incompatible with open-source methods of software development.
Much more here (registration required):
http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20090616/REG/306169994
I understand these meetings went pretty well and that the OS community is feeling happier.
Fourth last we have:
4:28 PM | June 15, 2009
A former Cedars-Sinai Medical Center employee was sentenced to four years, eight months in prison after pleading guilty today to stealing patient information to defraud insurance companies of $354,000.
The hospital had sent letters in December to more than 1,000 patients, warning them that their personal information had been found during a search of the home of James Allen Wilson, who worked in the billing department between 2003 and 2007.
Much more here:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/06/cedarsinai-worker-gets-prison-for-stealing-patient-records.html
Well I am sure that will focus the minds of those involved in things like this.
Third last we have:
16 Jun 2009
The Department of Health has shelved plans for a massive expansion of its personal health record project, HealthSpace.
HealthSpace was conceived as a way to allow people to access and eventually add to a version of their Summary Care Records. But like the national SCR project, it has suffered from lengthy delays.
An £80m-plus business case, that was due to be submitted to the Treasury, now appears to have been kicked into the long grass. Most of the team working on HealthSpace has been stood down and released for other work, with just a skeleton crew retained.
Last year’s Health Informatics Review outlined a wide-ranging role for HealthSpace, but the DH has now done a U-turn and demanded more evidence of the site’s value to patients before pushing ahead with further expansion.
Plans for HealthSpace were based on making it a hub for transactional services, so patients could book nurse or GP appointment, manage long-term conditions, order repeat prescriptions or medication reviews and complete pre-registration assessments online.
Other planned services included access to letters and test results and access to data sent through telehealth devices.
Low take-up of the services currently offered by HealthSpace has done little to promote the portal’s cause.
Figures released to GP Dr Neil Bhatia under the Freedom of Information Act show that out of more than 250,000 records created, just 812 people had activated an advanced HealthSpace account and only 437 had accessed their SCR.
Much more here:
http://www.ehiprimarycare.com/news/4938/healthspace_expansion_plans_shelved
I think the NHHRC needs to look closely at this outcome for any implications for their stated PHR plans.
Second last for the week we have:
The Ottawa Citizen June 17, 2009
Dr. Alan Hudson is being replaced as chairman of eHealth Ontario.
The chairman of eHealth Ontario has been fired, Premier Dalton McGuinty was to announce Wednesday afternoon, according to a published report in Toronto.
A report at thestar.com said McGuinty, who was defending Hudson just last week, would make the news official at a mid-afternoon news conference.
More here:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Health+chairman+fired/1705766/story.html
The last act of the play it seems. I hope things can get back on the rails quickly and successfully.
Last, and very usefully, we have:
By Carol Diamond and Josh Lemieux
12 June 2009
With billions of taxpayer dollars about to be invested, the stakes are indisputably high to set the right priorities for accelerating the benefits of health information technology. What should those priorities be?
It would be easy to assume that the main focus should be on technology-related issues—standards, software, hardware, technical support, and so forth. After all, isn’t “IT” what we are talking about? But technology-related goals often seduce and distract us from the heart of the matter.
And the heart of the matter is: “What is the IT for?”
Clay Shirky and I have written about the misconception that simply creating technical standards will magically lead to the rapid adoption of health IT.1 Ironically, one of the biggest obstacles to expanding the use of health IT may be a narrow focus on stimulating its adoption. Success is not how many doctors and hospitals use electronic medical records. Success is when clinical outcomes improve. Success is when everyone can learn which methods and treatments work and which don’t in days instead of decades.
Now that the federal government is investing upwards of $30 billion to help stimulate health IT adoption among providers and hospitals as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), it’s critical that we define success in the right way.
Much more here:
http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/health_care/health-should-be-at-the-heart-of-health-it
This is an important perspective that needs to be carefully thought through.
There is an amazing amount happening. Enjoy!
David.
