Investment in new healthcare companies in Northeast Ohio nearly tripled last year, bringing more than $240 million to the region. Greater Cleveland has the potential to be one of the nation's top five centers for health care innovation. Northeast Ohio already has taken a big step in that direction--its health care companies have attracted an average of more than $100 million in investments during each of the last five years.
California has become the second state to introduce a Web site that helps consumers find out how much hospitals are willing to discount care for uninsured patients. New York previously gave consumers a tool to shop and compare charity care or discount payment policies. The California site, called the Hospital Fair Pricing Program, is a result of a 2006 law authored by former Democratic Assemblywoman Wilma Chan of Oakland.
Medical technology company Stryker Corp. will voluntarily recall certain hip surgery products after receiving a warning from regulators. The company is recalling Trident PSL and Hemispherical Acetabular Cups, but Stryker representatives said there are no safety issues for patients who received these products.
New state-of-the-art equipment is allowing the staff at Jefferson Memorial Hospital in Crystal City, MO to make faster and more accurate diagnoses. The machine combine nuclear medicine and CT scan technology into one event.
Several recent studies and surveys suggest growing skepticism about the longevity of regional health information organizations, aka "RHIOs." Nearly 70 percent of respondents to our own recent unscientific online poll agreed that most RHIOs will cease operations within the near future. Although most people understand the importance of data sharing across competitive organizations, many are wondering if the multitude of RHIOs will have staying power. Financial and governance issues--not the technological capability in play--are often cited as stumbling blocks.
I have been fascinated and mystified over the sheer number of RHIOs that have sprung up in the last few years. It's as if someone waved a wand over the country and said, "Let's set up healthcare data exchanges." I suppose you could argue that this someone is George Bush, whose call to action on EMRs a few years back (supplemented by enhanced federal visibility and grant money) may have prompted all the action.
Despite the growing doubts, RHIO organizers are continuing to push forward. Last week, I sat in on a press conference staged by HealthInfoNet, a Maine-based data exchange that is just getting under way. HealthInfoNet is launching a 24-month demonstration project that includes 15 hospitals and more than one-third of the practicing physicians in the state. The primary vendor partner is 3M, which is providing interoperability technology, the clinical data repository, and the master patient index. To sidestep the inevitable privacy issues, the exchange will grant patients the ability to completely opt out of the exchange, in essence making their data off-limits. Now that's a preemptive strike against paranoia! It could backfire, I suppose, if enough people were scared off by the prospects of their medical record traversing a state-wide electronic network.
The group has secured $4 million out of the $6 million it says it will need to complete the effort. Half of that money has come from foundations, with the rest from business, providers, government, and--are you ready for this?--payers (health plans have anted up a whopping 1 percent of the budget so far). Exactly where the rest of the budget will come from is unclear, although the exchange's leaders do understand the importance of a sustainable business model. By sharing medication lists, lab values, and other clinical reports, the exchange hopes to improve care and reduce costs by eliminating the redundant testing that plagues the industry. "We have huge potential to reduce cost," said Chuck Hewitt, chief operating officer at Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor and a member of the HealthInfoNet board of directors.
Few might challenge that assumption. Making it come to life, however, is another issue. The state of Maine is about to become a highly visible test case.
A recent article on The Wall Street Journal online reported on a poll the newspaper conducted along with Harris Interactive that found most Americans think electronic medical records can improve healthcare in this country and that EMR benefits overshadow any potential privacy risks.
As those who are familiar with MEDecision might imagine, this was music to our collective ears (or eyes, as it were). The WSJ/Harris poll bears out an important belief we've held for some time; one that I've represented in various public forums on several occasions: By all means, privacy concerns are real and legitimate when we talk about the proliferation of health information exchange and EMRs. However, we can't let ourselves get so caught up in the privacy issue that we compromise progress on the greater matter at hand, which is electronically gathering and deploying clinical information to improve care. In other words, the greater risk right now is not the misuse of clinical information, it's the non-use of it.
Apparently, a majority of Americans agree with our reasoning. According to the WSJ/Harris poll, about 60 percent of the people surveyed said that the benefits of EMRs outweigh potential security risks. Three-quarters of people surveyed said they think that care would improve if doctors and other parties could share information electronically. More than 60 percent thought that sharing information would decrease medical errors and over 50 percent think doing so could lower costs.
The WSJ article went on to mention that technology is likely to become a large part of the healthcare debate in the 2008 elections, and I'm inclined to agree. Based on the results of the poll, however, it looks like consumer confidence in EMRs is growing, which should send a message to our politicians that America is ready to move forward with them.
David St.Clair is founder and CEO of MEDecision.
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