Tag: "EMR"

The Down Side of EMR

Tasks that once took seconds to perform on paper now require multistepped points and clicks through a maze of menus. Checking patients into the office is an odyssey involving scanners and the collection of demographic data — their race, their preferred language, and so much more — required by Medicare to prove that we are achieving “meaningful use” of our EMR. What “meaningful use” means no one knows for sure, but our manual on how to achieve it is 150 pages long…

When the clicks don’t get me what I want, I naughtily handwrite a prescription. I skip ordering certain tests I might want because it takes too much time — I’ll do it next visit. I dreaded the arrival of this season’s flu-shot supply — now there were more orders to input!

Anne Marie Valinoti’s editorial in the WSJ.

Nov 02, 2012 | 6 comments | by

How Kaiser Manages High Blood Pressure

Kaiser used its electronic medical records to identify 88,000 members in the Denver area with hypertension and created a registry to track those whose blood pressure was still too high. It contacts them to come in for hypertension checks annually. And it uses teams of skilled professionals to help patients with lifestyle changes and medications. Kaiser also offers patients home blood-pressure monitors at cost, or about $35, through its pharmacies and provides free blood-pressure checks on a walk-in basis.

Some 83% of Kaiser Colorado’s hypertension patients now have their blood pressure under control. That is up from 61% when the health system launched the program in 2008.

Source: Wall Street Journal.

Oct 19, 2012 | 11 comments | by

Verdict on EMR: Not Good

The first national coordinator for health information technology, Dr. David J. Brailer, was appointed in 2004, by President George W. Bush. Dr. Brailer encouraged the beginnings of the switch from paper charts to computers. But in an interview last month, he said: “The current information tools are still difficult to set up. They are hard to use. They fit only parts of what doctors do, and not the rest.”

Based on error rates in other industries, the report estimates that if and when electronic health records are fully adopted, they could be linked to at least 60,000 adverse events a year.

Entire article is worth reading.

Oct 18, 2012 | 8 comments | by

Personalized Medicine is Right Around the Corner

Later this year, a Boston-based company called MC10 will offer the first of several “stretchable electronics” products that can be put on things like shirts and shoes, worn as temporary tattoos or installed in the body. These will be capable of measuring not just heart rate, the company says, but brain activity, body temperature and hydration levels. Another company, called Proteus, will begin a pilot program in Britain for a “Digital Health Feedback System” that combines both wearable technologies and microchips the size of a sand grain that ride a pill right through you. Powered by your stomach fluids, it emits a signal picked up by an external sensor, capturing vital data. Another firm, Sano Intelligence, is looking at micro needle sensors on skin patches as a way of deriving continuous information about the bloodstream.

Source: NYT. More on this in future posts.

Sep 17, 2012 | 8 comments | by

Too Much Freedom?

Want to monitor your blood pressure and sugar level? Eat healthier meals? Screen yourself for depression? Find out if you need glasses? Now you can do it all with apps on your smartphone. In fact, there are 40,000 medical applications available for download on smartphones and tablets — and the market is still in its infancy…Some even replace devices used in hospitals and doctors’ offices, such as glucometers and the high-quality microscopes used by dermatologists to examine skin irregularities.

But so far, the market has been something of an unregulated Wild West; for doctors and patients alike, it is difficult to know which apps actually live up to their health claims or provide accurate information. Last year, the FDA began to lay down the law. The agency released a first draft of guidelines that require mobile apps developers making medical claims to apply for FDA approval for those applications, the same way that new medical devices must be proven safe and effective before they can be sold.

Source: Kaiser Health News.

Jul 10, 2012 | 6 comments | by

EMRs: Here’s the Problem

Ms. Faulkner understands why it’s taken much longer for the health care industry than, say, banks and airlines to move to electronic data. In banking, the types of data are much more limited and known, she says. In health care, by contrast, data is constantly changing based on information from doctors, nurses, patients and others. New discoveries, protocols and government requirements add even more complexity.

Full article on electronic medical records.

Jan 19, 2012 | 5 comments | by

British EMR Experiment Ends in Failure

While the Obama administration is in the process of spending billions on developing electronic medical records, the British government has concluded that its £12.7 billion national electronic medical records system is a failure and that “there can be no confidence that the programme has delivered or can be delivered as originally conceived.” The Telegraph reports that Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, said “Labour’s NHS IT Programme let down the NHS and wasted taxpayers’ money by imposing a top-down IT system on the local NHS, which didn’t fit their needs.”

The two parts that have worked and will be retained have been a part of the U.S. health care landscape for some years. The first is a nationwide NHS email system. The second is Choose and Book. Choose and Book lets patients who have been given a password and a reference number by their primary care physician “choose where [one] goes for your first consultation by comparing the hospitals [one has] been shortlisted at” and book, cancel, or change one’s appointment online as well as by phone.

Sep 30, 2011 | 6 comments | by

Quote of the Day

Fantasy baseball managers have far more data to evaluate players for their teams than patients and referring doctors have in matter affecting life, death and disability.

George Shultz, Arnold Milstein, and Robert Krughoff, Wall Street Journal.

Sep 27, 2011 | 5 comments | by

Ever Wonder Why Health Care is so Much Cheaper Outside the Country?

This is Kevin Outterson at The Incidental Economist:

In October 2013, the US health care system will undergo a dramatic coding change as we transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10….

[H]ospital inpatient procedural codes will grow from 3,800 to 72,000; physician diagnostic codes from 14,000 to 69,000. Implementation costs for a three physician practice may average $83,000, with the per-doctor implementation cost dropping to $28,500 in a ten doctor practice. (see Harris Meyer’s reporting in May 2011 Health Affairs). No one reimburses providers for these transition costs.

Aug 15, 2011 | 6 comments | by

Health IT Spending Is Not Working in Britain

The National Programme for IT in the National Health Service was launched in 2002 with a 2010 goal of providing every NHS patient with his very own electronic medical record. Yet in its most recent report, the British National Audit Office states that the Department of Health there has been a:

steady reduction in value delivered not matched by a reduction in costs. On this basis we conclude that the £2.7 billion spent on care records systems so far does not represent value for money, and we do not find grounds for confidence that the remaining planned spend of £4.3 billion will be different.

As in the U.S., the system was sold with claims that it would improve services and the quality of care. In fact, many of the proposed applications, like internet appointment scheduling, electronic prescribing, computerized order entry in hospitals, and a secure organizational broadband communications network are already in use, without government subsidy, in the U.S.

Read More » »

Jul 20, 2011 | 8 comments | by
« Previous Page — Next Page »