A Unified Identity for Health IT
As Dr. David Blumenthal, National Coordinator for Health IT, wrote in recent blog, health IT is a team effort – one that requires different players working together toward the common goals of increased coordination, quality, safety, and efficiency in our health care system.
The HITECH Act is helping to gather an all-star team whose members come from across different governmental agencies and departments as well as private-sector partners, including universities, health systems and medical centers across the country. This team is working together to carry out a wide array of programs and projects to advance nationwide adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records. These include the Regional Extension Centers, Beacon Communities, Workforce Development programs, and more.
I am pleased today to announce our new unifying theme that reflects the teamwork taking place across the country: “Connecting America for Better Health.” This message clearly illustrates one of HITECH’s guiding principles – namely, that we are all in this together.
The new theme and visual identity, which appears at the top of this web page, really captures the spirit of these combined efforts to boost national adoption of electronic health records and ensure success. The insignia will also help people easily identify and connect with official HITECH information, resources, programs, and partners.
But the “connecting” doesn’t end there. Providers, software developers, health care administrators, and patients are our partners in this effort to transform our health care system through health IT. Electronic health records and health information exchange are the tools that will connect us all and help bring about better health care for America.
This is really a good news that everybody is working together for a better health care for America.
Yesterday we went to our tribe’s health center. My daughters and my husband were asked to update
their personal health history because the clinic is upgrading their database and they will be adopting
chartless.
I believe the clinic is wanting to serve the people better in health care.
As a US Army veteran I am pleased to see that the Veterans Administration began using computerized patient records in the mid 1990s and today these records are available 100% of the time to VA healthcare workers. VistA, the electronic health record system, was developed by the VA and it is used at more than 1300 VA facilities throughout the United States to maintain records of veterans who receive care from the VA.
The challenge now is to get the rest of our citizens wired into a national health information network.
This is indeed great news for us folk who really need better health care. It is such a hassle most of the time finding, getting, and even remembering your medical records. With this new data network for medical records, hospitals can easily access and find your records with ease. An implication technology put into good use is not a waste of time and money.
i hope this is a great follow up for the recently announced health care bill by the President of United States. Converting medical records from hard copy to soft copy is one the most challenging work. If this is done in a right manner it will be boon to the healthcare industry and also the Government.
This will also lead to lots of new job opportunities in various fields like data entry, document scanning, document conversion, medical transcription and more and more people will be employed at the end of the day.
EHRs are truly a big portion of the promise of better healthcare. There is far too much margin for error with traditional medical chart and filing systems. It will be a huge paradigm shift, to be sure, but a very necessary one.
Having implemented systems across large states I can tell you one thing that I don’t see mention much is derivation of common processes across agencies and remote communities (user bases).
Until the problem of getting everyone on the same page as how they do things any talk to a single IT system to support its processes is a little useless. Users and user acceptance is the biggest wildcards in most cross prganization type implementation.
Agree with William and Bradford that this is a much needed and positive move towards better healthcare. However, I think Paul hit the nail on the head, untill we have agencies working with common processes and protocols progress will be very difficult.
Collaborative teamwork is an important component of assuring success of the HITECH Act. Perhaps the best comment from this message is, “we are all in this together.” Consumer centered care has been discussed since the inception of the Office of the National Coordinator in 2004; however it presently has great potential to move into center stage. The passage of the HITECH Act and the exemplary work of ONC during the past 20 months have provided an exhausting overview of recommendations for best practices of care. The complexity of harmonizing standards and agreement on best practices is overwhelming for many providers and consumers alike. While there is no one size that fits all, it appears we are moving to a number of agreed upon consistencies in health care.
The Meaningful Use Workgroup has discussed several times the concept of a “shared care record” or even a “shared care” summary. Perhaps this is a good lever for a paradigm shift in consumer participation. Making this shift will obviously require significant software re-design as well as workflow and behavior redesign, however could represent proof that health care needs to be consumer centric. Further research into this concept is warranted and may be one of several useful nudges to encourage consumers to become active participants rather than passive recipients of care. Consumers need to be aware of all potential factors influencing their care and having a shared care philosophy—both in practice and in EHRs–could be a powerful consumer introduction to health information technology.
Its great to see this enthusiasm. But nothing great will occur unless medical practices are allowed to be a free enterprise, i.e. they can charge appropriate to the level of IT use and quality of care provided and are able to fully pass on IT-related costs to their consumers. In other words, the ONC’s first duty is to convince the leaders that price-fixing for medical services must end, and consumers must be allowed to select their providers based on the value of service they receive, just like they select any other service they purchase. Otherwise all this is simply wishful thinking.
Collaborative teamwork is an important component of assuring success of the HITECH Act. Perhaps the best comment from this message is, “we are all in this together.” Consumer centered care has been discussed since the inception of the Office of the National Coordinator in 2004; however it presently has great potential to move into center stage. The passage of the HITECH Act and the exemplary work of ONC during the past 20 months have provided an exhausting overview of recommendations for best practices of care. The complexity of harmonizing standards and agreement on best practices is overwhelming for many providers and consumers alike. While there is no one size that fits all, it appears we are moving to a number of agreed upon consistencies in health care.
The Meaningful Use Workgroup has discussed several times the concept of a “shared care record” or even a “shared care” summary. Perhaps this is a good lever for a paradigm shift in consumer participation. Making this shift will obviously require significant software re-design as well as workflow and behavior redesign, however could represent proof that health care needs to be consumer centric. Further research into this concept is warranted and may be one of several useful nudges to encourage consumers to become active participants rather than passive recipients of care. Consumers need to be aware of all potential factors influencing their care and having a shared care philosophy—both in practice and in EHRs–could be a powerful consumer introduction to health information technology.
@A Cavale
For the life of me I can’t imagine why you think it’s a good idea for medical practices to pass on it related costs to their customers. As if the prices of health care to the consumer need to go any higher?
My primary care physician’s office is now totally computerized. My doctor walks in with a wireless laptop. Even my prescriptions are printed out on a laser printer instead of hand written. But from the perspective of a patient, this has not changed the quality of care I receive at all. Rather, it makes the physician’s and the office staff’s jobs much easier. It allows them to see more patients in a shorter period of time. It allows them to streamline their process. Aren’t patients already paying for their doctors’ cost of doing business with the fees they are paying already? I don’t think it’s reasonable for medical providers to take the approach that “we’re computerized now, so we’re going to jack up our prices.” If it’s about providing better healthcare, then it will provide “cheaper” healthcare, not higher prices.
And as far as the whole computerization thing, it’s a cost of “staying” in business, not providing higher quality service. And as a computer programmer, let me tell you that there is margin for error when using computer systems just as their is margin for error with paper records. Just because the data is stored in a computer does not guarantee that it will all be perfect and no mistakes will ever be made.