Texas Technology - Fall 2008 - (Page 24) some nationalized systems in Europe, for instance, have historically outpaced the U.S. in health information solutions. Still, she said people at the top levels of healthcare management are beginning to see the wisdom of investing in health-information science. For example, the UT school regularly secures federal research grants and works with giants like the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Defense Department. “Hospitals are willing to fund some IT projects and corporations are starting to see the benefit,” Dunn said. “Information is the currency of health care, so you may as well pay a little more for managing it.” Texas has an especially bold attitude toward new health-information systems, Focusing Electronic Records Dunn said. For example, statewide efforts At the same time, the school is engaged in to implement electronic health records for projects to improve the way patients’ infor- foster children have become models for mation is stored and passed along between programs designed in other parts of the health-care providers — a chain at times as country. Along with a willingness to shake inscrutable as the blueprint of a DNA mole- up the status quo, Houston makes a fitting cule. Electronic medical records (EMR) are a petri dish for experimentation in public big cause that’s gaining traction nationwide. health because so many of its residents are “It’s been successful to a greater extent … uninsured. “In Houston, anywhere from in large-scale systems and large group prac- 20 to 30 percent of people don’t have tices,” Smith said of EMR adoption. “It’s health insurance,” Dunn said. been quite challenging to take those ideas Dunn has already established an and provide that technology at the level of effective model for health-information the individual practitioner.” exchange among private health-care proEven with the best intentions, Dunn said viders, called the Your Doctor Program. convincing people to adopt EMR is often While incorporating disaster prepareda tough sell. “It’s a problem getting accep- ness, HealthQuilt also will smooth the tance from the doctors and nurses because transfer of medical information between you’re changing the way people are doing doctors, hospitals and other care providthings. It’s a big challenge,” she said. “You ers, and make specialty care more acceshave to think of what the benesible by opening channels for fits to them are — it will create telemedicine. financial benefits, and it will Fred Trotter, HealthQuilt’s Founded in 1997, improve the efficiency in their lead programmer, said some the University of clinical process.” of Houston’s largest medical Texas School of Tack on the reluctance of networks have developed efHealth Information Sciences at Houston insurers and medical groups fective systems for transmitting combines the to pay for something that isn’t information across their own disciplines of engineering, biomedicine, immediately necessary, Dunn networks. Many of the hospitals computer science and said, and you begin to see why serving Houston’s at-risk popucognitive science. public health. Because of the entrepreneurial and forward-looking culture of Texas, it’s not surprising that the first school of this type would be in Texas.” In the years since the school’s founding in 1997, the tools used to gather biomedical data have progressed so much that organizing and interpreting those numbers has emerged as a key growth area in medical research. Smith cited the Human Genome Project — which decoded the map of human DNA — as a prime example of the wealth of data available to researchers. “That’s a tremendous challenge to manage and take advantage of that information. Increasingly vast storehouses of this information are digital,” Smith said. Dr. Kim Dunn, assistant professor, UT School of Health Information Sciences fastfacts lations, though, are by necessity less coordinated. “We’re trying to focus on safety-net clinics and the uninsured,”Trotter said. “We have this massive indigent-care problem, and so we’re trying to focus on bringing efficiency to what is known as the safety net.” So far, HealthQuilt is a promising model for public health-care management, though its pilot programs are still relatively new. Because the program is rooted in the School of Health Information Sciences, its results will be well documented when the time comes to grow the model to something larger. “How many organizations actually go back and study the results of that rollout?” Trotter asked. “Because of the partnership with this institution, we have the resources to study just about everything we do.” For researchers at the school, the real work begins only after successfully rolling out a project (e.g., after collecting data for city evacuation plans). “My passion right now is trying to get an accountable healthcare system,” Dunn said. “It really does come down to aligning roles and developing feedback loops for quality assuredness.” “It’s like when you leave a doctor’s office, what do they tell you? ‘If you’re not better, come back.’ We should be doing better than that, right?” N Patrick Michels is an Austin, Texas, and San Francisco-based writer. 24_TexasTechnology
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