Healthcare IT News - May 2008 - (Page 9)

www.HealthcareITNews.com May 2008 ■ Healthcare IT News By glEN TullMaN, Allscripts CEO O M M N T R y and Care Management solutions, the 6,000 extended care facilities connected to our care management discharge solution, and the 40,000 physicians using Allscripts Electronic Health Records, Practice Management, electronic prescribing, document imaging, physician education and other products. This will be especially valuable for Misys practice management clients who currently lack an EHR – 90,000 in all – and who we hope will buy ours, when the time is right. In the long run, then, Allscripts will deliver interoperable IT solutions of the highest quality to 150,000+ physicians and thousands more clinicians in hospitals and post-acute facilities nationwide. As a result, roughly one third of the nation’s patients will feel safer knowing their medical records can follow them nearly everywhere they go – from their physician to the ER, to the hospital bed, and on into post-acute recovery. Better information. Higher quality healthcare. An interoperable, connected healthcare system. All provided more cost-effectively. That’s our goal and why we came together. Personally, I can’t imagine a better outcome. n More at HealthcareITNews.com e connect: tULLMaN 0508 Physicians will benefit from EMR market consolidation that Allscripts and Misys Healthcare are combining to create a new industry leader, with a client base of nearly one out of three practicing physicians in the United States. It’s a change that we believe brings our dream of an interoperable, connected healthcare system one big step closer to reality – and with it, the promise of improved care at lower cost for millions of Americans. Given how much discussion the announcement has generated, I thought I would weigh in with my perspective on how this opportunity came together, and where we’ll head from here. When I first met Mike Lawrie, CEO of Misys plc, the parent company of Misys Healthcare, we quickly realized that we had the same passion for improving healthcare and the same view of how it could be accomplished. What’s needed, we believe, is to bring the power of technology, which has improved quality and reduced costs in every other industry, to healthcare. Our view is that healthcare is fundamentally an information business and that the challenge is how to deliver real-time information to physicians and caregivers to improve clinical care, gain efficiencies and take out cost. Both of us had done this in other industries and felt it needed to happen in healthcare. Not in the future but right now. y now you’ve lIkely heard We also understood that to make this a reality, it would take consolidation and scale to drive the required investments. Why? Think about the market as a whole. Today, more than 150 vendors are vying to sell electronic health records to physicians. That’s a different EHR for every 3,500 physicians – the equivalent of having more than 85,000 different breakfast cereals lining shelves at the grocery store. By almost any measure, this is a fragmented market. And, while competition is good, fragmentation is not. The sheer number and variety of EHR vendors, without any standards until CCHIT arrived, allowed for a lack of quality and made comparison shopping a fulltime job for physicians. That’s especially true for the more than half of U.S. physicians who work in smaller practices without an in-house information technology specialist to do the shopping for them. Worse, the substantial number of smaller vendors makes it inevitable that many will not have the dollars to invest and may not survive, again increasing risk to the buyers and slowing adoption. Fragmentation also drives up costs and reduces connectivity at a time when our healthcare system can least afford it. Hospitals who want to connect to physicians in their communities (which is increasingly common with the Stark rule changes) may have to build and maintain as many as 50 different interfaces – a cost that can run into millions of dollars. The largest hospital chains have already begun to drive standardization by limiting their selection to the two or three CCHIT-certified systems that have high KLAS ratings, a significant installed base, and the financial resources to continue “Fragmentation also DRIVES UP COSTS and REDUCES CONNECTIVITY at a time when our healthcare system can least afford it.” to invest into the future. But the most important benefit of consolidation is connectivity. In the cell phone industry, consolidation paired with innovation gave us universal connectivity, and that’s exactly what will happen in healthcare. Our merger is a big step in that direction. Allscripts and Misys Healthcare will do more than provide our joint client base access to a broader suite of highly complementary, industry-leading products. Eventually, all 110,000 of the physicians who use Misys systems today also will be able to interface with the more than 700 hospitals using our HealthMatics ED ● glen Tullman is chief executive officer of allscripts (Nasdaq: MDrX). He will retain that role with allscripts-Misys Healthcare once the merger is consummated. Physicians ‘hungry for information’ By Jack Varga, HIMS Fellow lETTErS Continued from page 8 in a pilot project for a state Medicaid office to provide a claims-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) populated with Medicaid claims that were accessible to participating physicians via the Web. As with any pilot, we learned valuable lessons on what works and what should be improved – both from a technical and a data perspective. First, and most gratifying in many ways, we found nearly all of the physicians were hungry for what I call “consolidated information” about their patients. They want and need to know: 1) If Mrs. Smith picked up her medication (or was regularly refilling a chronic medication), 2) Did Mr. Jones see the ophthalmologist for his annual diabetic eye exam, 3) Had Mrs. White received her wheelchair, or 4) What was the Problem List for the new patient on the schedule later today? All of this information was available in the EHR, populated with Medicaid claims data in a proprietary parsing tool and display in a clinically useful format. Information that previously would have required a phone call – or several phone calls – by the office staff, often extended the patient’s appointment time or required a return appointment to finalize a treatment plan, was handled immediately. Anecdotally, we were informed of cases ecently, I was Involved R where a family physician discovered a patient on his panel had been seen in the emergency room over the weekend; a psychiatrist learned his patient was attending job placement classes; and a pediatrician found lab tests had been completed on a hypothyroid patient. We also learned the office staff ’s access to the EHR was highly important. During the pilot, only physicians were able to access our Web site. Physicians unanimously agreed that since most of this information is currently collected by their office staff (in the analog model), it is necessary to permit office staff the same or very similar access as the physician. This ensures widespread adoption and permits easy integration into current office workflows. Our pilot physicians felt there was little time during the busy workday to regularly access a Web site to obtain information. Most providers advocated a team approach to office care often involving clinical support staff. For those who had already implemented an electronic medical record, they agreed that integration or importation of this information into their EMRs was a high priority. All of the physicians who participated in this pilot were eager to provide suggestions for enhancements, recommendations for expanding data feeds and feedback for the expanded availability of the tool across the state. Some of the statistics frequently publicized about physician use of EMRs emphasize low adoption rates (15-25%), which leads some people to say “Why don’t these doctors want to move into the electronic world?” One of the most important messages I learned from this experience was my fellow physicians are “hungry for information,” “dedicated to doing what’s right for the patient,” and looking for ways to “integrate their workflow” with the coming fire hose of patient-related information that is around the corner. But physicians want to actively collaborate on how information is integrated, presented and delivered. By participating with providers in this manner, the healthcare IT community (vendor, consultant, government, payer) can ease the transition to electronic environments and data exchanges, improve provider adoption and acceptance, and deliver the results we seek more quickly. We all have a role in improving access and healthcare outcomes, as well as decreasing costs. Jack Varga, MD, MHSa, cPHIMS, FHIMSS, is a board certified ophthalmologist with background in quality improvement, patient safety and healthcare IT. Following his 20-year Navy career, he worked in commercial EHr implementations and was a consultant in the federal healthcare IT environment. He is currently medical director of the EDS Electronic Health record center of Excellence with an office in Falls church, Va. Look at, speak to, examine the patient V ery InterestIng error source described in your article. (Electronic records prone to error, docs write in New England Journal of Medicine http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story. cms?id=9081) Clearly the possibility of error propagation, with its harm potential, should serve to remind care givers that we have a moral obligation to our patients, to keep the records accurate. If all else fails, look at, speak to AND examine the patient! The danger of intellectual castration attendant to computer use needs constant restatement. This is particularly important in a world of clinical decision support. Does our unique patient fit the selection criteria, on which the CDS was based? C http://www.HealthcareITNews.com http://HealthcareITNews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9158 http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9081 http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9081 http://HealthcareITNews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9156

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Healthcare IT News - May 2008

Healthcare IT News - May 2008 Contents Help Wanted Speeding Up Government Silos Privacy Pressures Tracking Disease Rah Rah Health! TriZetto Suit Outcomes Watch Ambulatory EHRs

Healthcare IT News - May 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.