The Boca Raton, FL-based West Boca Medical Center has expanded its neonatal intensive care unit by 10 beds, from 24 to 34. The $3.5 million, 3,200-square-foot addition to the NICU is important to the community, said Larry Coomes, the hospital's chief operating officer. In 2007 302 babies, more than 13% of the 2,254 deliveries at the medical center, were admitted to NICU with an average stay of one to six weeks. Coomes said women are having babies later in life, and some are becoming pregnant through in-vitro fertilization—two factors that increase the risk of premature birth.
"Hillary Clinton has no idea how an electronic medical record works!" That came from an audience member weighing in on the appropriate government role in facilitating the adoption of healthcare IT at last week's Towards the Electronic Patient Record conference. The 24th annual TEPR event drew to Fort Lauderdale its usual assortment of IT wonks, curious physicians, and overzealous sales people. Scattered among them were innovators with substantial stories to share. The open forum on what the next president should do drew an equally motley array of commentary, including the Clinton naysayer's. Her point, however, was that few elected officials understand the industry's need for clinical IT, and that education is in order. No one disputed that point, although ideas on how to make such schooling possible were in short supply.
Any elected official who happened upon the forum might have been puzzled by the lack of consensus on the industry's willingness to change. Citing the almost mythical physician resister, one outspoken commentator insisted that an entire generation of older physicians needed to die before any progress can occur. I could just hear a Hillary Clinton listening to that, and wondering, "Now let's see, you want how many billions for this healthcare IT, but you won't be able to put it to use until at least one generation of physicians leaves this planet for keeps." There was a pro-physician rebuttal, luckily, as a practice manager duly observed that until the technology "disappears"—meaning when it becomes a seamless part of the doctor's workflow—physicians will likely continue to balk at its use. Age is not the factor, he said, but rather priorities.
TEPR's tireless champion, C. Peter Waegemann (who serves as CEO of the Medical Records Institute, the event's sponsor), did a nice job of fielding and synthesizing the numerous comments, even when his 60-second speaking rule was ignored. I swear, one reason there has been so little political support for clinical IT is the inability of industry proponents to make a case in anything less than 10,000 words. An open forum always runs the risk of becoming Grandstanding Central.
The broad role that IT plays in daily life was not lost on this crowd. During the conference, I heard multiple references to YouTube, MySpace, and online banking services, all of which have captured the imagination of the public in ways no one could have predicted. Inevitably, these references were couched in a bit of awe, at the sheer popularity of these online services, and also a bit of mystery—why does healthcare struggle for comparable uptake?
We heard from Microsoft's James Mault, MD, on that score. Mault described the software giant's vision for a "health ecosystem," meaning an online personal health record service that consumers will control. In his view, consumers will drive the data exchange and consolidation that people like Waegemann have been promoting for years. And indeed, there were vendors on the exhibit floor selling flash drives designed to house clinical data for consumers to tote from caregiver to caregiver. Even if Hillary Clinton has no idea how that kind of medical record would work, she is not alone. The industry itself is a long way from figuring it out.
Gary Baldwin is technology editor of HealthLeaders magazine. He can be reached at gbaldwin@healthleadersmedia.com.
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The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology has certified two more ambulatory electronic health records systems under its 2007 criteria. The new certifications are for Record UE Version 4.5 from Atlanta-based MedcomSoft Corp., and Sevocity Version 5.0 from San Antonio-based Conceptual Mindworks Inc. CCHIT has certified 31 systems under its 2007 criteria, which is no longer open for applications.
CINA
will assist HealthBridge, one of the nation's largest community Health Information Exchanges, in a data extraction and aggregation project to satisfy the requirements of a federally funded community-wide project to be initiated throughout regions of Cincinnati, OH. This initiative will attempt to demonstrate that data extracted from physician-based electronic medical records and practice management systems throughout the HealthBridge service area can be successfully integrated with HealthBridge's own clinical data for quality improvement purposes.
James Saul, MD, describes how an EMR boosted profitability at his 3-member internal medicine practice in Parma, OH. Saul presented at the 2008 TEPR conference.
The California Department of Insurance is encouraging consumers in the state to use Web-based personal health records. Despite their availability through insurers and managed-care groups, not enough Californians are using PHRs, according to a report issued by the Insurance Department. The report states that PHRs are efficient and secure, and give consumers a place to better manage their healthcare and deal with insurance claims.
A flash drive that will store all of a patient's personal health records is now on sale at 103 Kroger stores in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. The product, called MedFlash, will cost $29.95 and is about an inch long. The records can be downloaded through any computer.
For all it spends on healthcare, the United States really doesn't have a healthcare "system" consumers can use to evaluate providers and easily access information the way they can with airlines and banks, says U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt. One way of empowering consumers will be a "network of networks" of electronic medical records that will include quality and price information that will help to drive down costs, Leavitt recently said at the Medical College of Georgia. The school is currently working on a study about whether a secure electronic patient record system helps improve the health of patients. Leavitt also touted his department's work to establish electronic medical record networks in 28 pilot sites, and he thinks that most patients will have access to them by 2014.
Two years ago, infrastructure at Huntsville (AL) Hospital was so maxed out its three data centers had outgrown their own disaster recovery hardware and nearly outstripped the amount of power available from their existing connections. The hospital opted to remedy the situation with virtualization, and in a three-month pilot program Huntsville implemented IBM BladeCenter rack servers and VMware software to set up a scalable infrastructure that could cut costs both on the front end and the back end. The pilot program proved so successful that the hospital decided to go full bore with its virtualization effort.
A Web site developed by the Texas-based Angelina County & Cities Health District seeks to educate the public about the possibility of a future global disaster. In 2007, the ACCHD ran a billboard campaign to promote the Web site and now health officials are advertising again to remind people that there is still a threat looming. On the site, the health district gives step-by-step ways for residents to prepare for the worst.
