HealthCare Hot Topics & Buzzwords
Electronic Medical Record (EMR)
The electronic medical record concept primarily points to data sharing between hospitals, physicians’ clinics, labs, pharmacies, long-term care facilities, health departments, schools, and payers. This data exchanging will streamline the transfer of the patients’ medical information, reduce costs, improve the quality of care, improve diagnosis and treatment planning, improve billing/reimbursement turnaround, and reduce medical errors.
Systems are on the market that will help you prepare for effective data sharing. Check out Clarus at http://www.AmericanHealthNet.com.
National Health Information Network (NHIN)
In 2004, the President launched an initiative to make electronic health records available to most Americans within the next ten years. Realizing the promise of health IT will help transform our health care system by lowering costs, reducing medical errors, and improving quality of care in a more efficient and hassle-free environment. Greater reliance on electronic health records means that information needed to treat patients effectively will be a few computer clicks away, no matter where the patient is receiving care. The Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as some private health care systems, has already begun to demonstrate the power of health IT to reduce costs and errors and improve quality of care.
But don’t look for the network to affect community hospitals for five or six years.
Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) or Health Information Network (HIN)
Because of the slow timeline for the NHIN, most states are beginning to make plans of their own health information networks (HIN). But their timeline projections barely beat those of the NHIN. As a result, many hospitals and physicians’ organizations are planning their own regional health information organizations (RHIOs). Small pockets of progress can be seen, but widespread implementation of sharable electronic medical records has not happened.
Benefits
- Improve care quality .
- More effective diagnosis and treatment planning.
- Reduce unnecessary chronic care.
- Reduce healthcare costs through efficiencies and improved quality.
- Reduce redundancy of information passing.
- Post-encounter functions such as outcomes, disease management.
- Improve healthcare delivery by providing immediate, secure, confidential exchange of health information between authorized users.
- Enable providers and patients to make decisions based on near real-time access to health information .
- Provide warnings and reminders at the point of care.
- Reduce medical errors .
- Prevent adverse drug reactions.
- Encourage participation of patients in their own healthcare and chronic disease management.
- Improve billing turnaround time.
Potential Participants
- Hospital.
- Professionals.
- Health department.
- Schools.
- Neutral managing partner.
- Labs.
- Pharmacies.
- Technical advisor.
- Technical professionals.
- Payers.
Paperless Systems
No one likes paper systems. Staff spends too much time searching for lost paper. Paper systems require significant redundancy and expense.
Hospitals and physicians’ practices can store and retrieve face sheets, medical records, MARs , TARs, and scanned images of all patient papers. Registration forms, HIPAA information releases, insurance and identification documents can all be at ready access by the appropriate staff.
No more lost records. Much time can be saved by not having to search for these items. Many miles of walking can be eliminated, since these records can be viewed by any authorized staff member from any connected workstation.
Systems are available that allow you to go paperless. Check out Clarus at http://www.AmericanHealthNet.com
Pay for Performance
driven initiative is still in its infancy. The concept is to pay incentives to providers for improving the health of the community. Most payers currently pay a portion of their incentives for meeting a proscribed set of process-based quality measures. As pay or performance systems grow, outcomes-based measures will supplant these process-based measures. Another measure used in the model is patient satisfaction.
To position themselves to take advantage of future incentives small hospitals must insure that they have software that will allow simple data sharing with payers and administrators of pay for performance alliances.
Single Sign-on
How many passwords do you have to remember? As you move from application to application do you have to enter multiple passwords? Then, when you answer the phone and talk for a few minutes, your system has logged you off and you have to go through the multiple sign-on process over again.
Since most of your applications require you to change your password every sixty days or so, you and your staff can suffer serious cases of “password overload.”
Single sign-on systems keeps track of all of your passwords and allows you to log in once and have access to all applications.
Much time is saved by your staff in keeping track of and reentering their passwords. Support staff will spend less time resetting forgotten passwords. When you discharge an employee, you need to have their only password disabled. Productivity rises as a result.
According to a HIMSS Leadership Survey, 79% of healthcare technology leaders cited single sign-on as the top technology for purchase in 2006. The study identified the following benefits (listed in order of importance):
- Improved user satisfaction.
- Password-related administration needs to be reduced.
- Improved data security.
- Simplified management of password directories.
- Legacy applications have been single sign-on enabled.
- IT support costs significantly reduced.
In the coming months I will investigate the options for community hospitals to take advantage of this technology.
Consumer-driven Healthcare
As employers search for ways to reduce costs, many are funding healthcare savings accounts (HSA) to their employees. Thus, your patients are spending their own money for healthcare services.
Some will enroll in health plans designed for such patients. Others will pay providers directly from their HSAs.
This will lead many patients to begin to shop around for services. Price will become a larger factor as patients choose providers. To facilitate provider comparisons, some organizations will begin to post prices for services on the web. They will also begin to post quality and patient satisfaction measures.
It is unclear at this point on the impact of consumer-driven healthcare on community hospitals. Are patients willing to travel to distant communities to receive their healthcare See Price Transparency.
Price Transparency
As a result of upcoming consumer-driven healthcare, providers will need to make their prices available for public scrutiny. Web sites will pop up comparing providers’ prices.
What does it mean for your hospital? You may need to begin planning for more “package” pricing. This will simplify the comparison for the consumer. As with consumer-driven healthcare, the future impact of price transparency on community hospitals is unclear.
