ORLANDO – Electronic health records are so integral to industrializing the U.S. healthcare system that the superset phrase health IT has for a few years now been used somewhat synonymously with the subset EHRs.
Even when the day of nearly ubiquitous EHR adoption comes, that will be the foundation on which the U.S. is computerizing and digitizing its healthcare system, a beginning rather than an endpoint.
“We’re starting to slide down the other side of meaningful use incentives,” said the first national coordinator David Brailer, MD. “I think the fight for health IT in the next decade is a fight for relevance to show why it matters and what we actually did with all that money.”
Put another way: The real value from harnessing the digitized healthcare system, and the work to attain that, remain ahead.
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Indeed, the base EHR is starting to evolve as a platform for care, Kaveh Safavi, MD, managing director of global health at Accenture told Government Health IT.
The next wave of innovation will encompass “the ability to capitalize on digital information to make better decisions within healthcare,” Safavi and colleagues at Accenture wrote in a report released during the HIMSS14 conference. “Patients expect ownership of as well as access and greater transparency to their health information through Web and mobile-based products, similar to other industries.”
That is already starting to happen with meaningful use Stage 2 now underway, Stage 3 beyond that and much of the payment reforms coming down the pike, said Geeta Nayyar, MD, chief medical information officer at patient engagement vendor PatientPoint.
“There has to be a partnership between the patient and provider,” Nayyar added. “We’ll continue to see that become top of mind for vendors and providers moving forward.”
To that end, the federal government has an opportunity to encourage EHR vendors to create a more open architecture that effectively enables doctors and patients alike outside the core EHR to engage from a variety of devices, and that feed into analytics for population health management.
“If you expand your thinking about the early language of President Bush, it’s really about every American having access to their health information,” national coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, said during the same HIMSS14 session as Brailer. “Our job is not to get stuck in that EHR box. It’s not about the EHR, it’s about patients having access to their data.”
Date: March 04, 2014