The Health Care Foundation of Greater Kansas City hosted the "Health Information Technology & Exchange - A Regional Update" Conference in downtown Kansas City today. It brought together healthcare providers, insurers, payers, etc. from around the metropolitan area to collaborate on the topic of "Health Information Exchanges." Many of the different healthcare constituents had the opportunity to speak, creating a more holistic picture of the current environment for health information systems to be implemented.
Vicki Estrin of the Vanderbilt Center for Better Health presented her "best practices" for creating a health information exchange (HIE). Her findings were based off of the information exchange that Memphis, Tennessee has implemented, which is known as the MidSouth eHealth Alliance. Even though the project was successful in terms of linking providers in the Memphis area, there remains many areas in which they still need to connect with. Overall, it was impressive to see an entire community come together with their systems and agree on sharing information amongst their systems.
It was clear from today's conference that getting everyone on the same page in the healthcare sphere that sharing information is vital is extremely difficult. Each healthcare provider along with vendor and insurer has its own personal agenda when operating within the health arena, so asking them to change from an isolated framework to a collaborative, real-time data sharing network is far from an easy task. It takes months of continued open dialogue for each side to understand the other sides and then form an agreement that will benefit those that they provide care too.
Today's conference illustrated the true difficulties and varying constituents who have a hand in our healthcare system. With these varying, conflicting elements, it truly is an enormous task for our U.S. healthcare system to overwhelming adopt health information systems and have them "talk" to each other. Perhaps, the best advice given today during the conference is "to start small or wherever you can in implementing health IT." It will take a lot of small community efforts to join together in implementing the systems and linking them, but it will be through these numerous small efforts that progress will be made and aggregate to a larger sum of an integrated, electronic U.S. healthcare system.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Katie,
ReplyDeleteWhat a great blog! I definitely learned some new things while scrolling down the page. In regards to the conference held about the need for information exchange, I think it is unfortunate that healthcare providers, insurers, etc. are reluctant to work together for a cooperative healthcare information system. I think the end result would cause less headaches for the patient if their information was easily shared among the stakeholders of the healthcare arena. I understand the costs and time it would take to implement this, but I think in the long run it would greatly increase the efficiency of the system.
I agree that interoperability of different health care IT systems is critical. How interoperable are systems from different providers such as Cerner or EPIC? Do these large vendors provide systems primarily to monopolize the market, or are the systems designed to work hand in hand with each other?
ReplyDeleteAs much as I am for Health Care IT systems improving and moving patient information to the web, it scares me just as much. I think for people to be more open to the sharing of patient information the security measures need to be developed soon.
ReplyDeleteAshley Kornhaus
Healthcare IT is all very new to me. That is great how the healthcare in Memphis is shared. Where will we see this taking off next? Also, how do you see the timeline going as we work towards an integrated, electronic U.S. healthcare system?
ReplyDeleteThanks for all of the posts! First to respond to Ben's post, it would ideal that all systems be designed with an "open standards" mentality. Many are in fact done so. However, many proprietary vendors will still enable enough security around their systems, so you have to pay a price in order to talk with their systems.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, many are seeing that this mentality must end, and many changes are occurring right now to implement an entire nationwide health network.
With regards to Randy's question, health care IT is no question in the cards for the future of health care. It, in fact, seems one of the primary solutions for lowering the costs of health care. As for a timeline, health care IT is evolving rapidly, especially as health care costs continue to rise and the benefits of using the technology are increasingly seen.