Healthcare IT News - August 2008 - (Page 21)

www.HealthcareITNews.com physiCiaN pRaCTiCes & amBUlaToRy CaRe August 2008 ■ Healthcare IT News 21 the biggest barrier to interoperability is convincing all stakeholders to participate. “CDS, it is important to note, will not replace the clinician,” she affirmed. “The technology should allow clinicians to focus their energies on their patients and to provide better care rather than trying to retain information. With patient lives at stake, technology vendors need to do more than pay lip service to the topic of interoperability.” ■ More at cds Continued from page 20 algorithms and computers do outperform most doctors on some tasks. “The ‘art of medicine’ is still highly regarded among providers, and critics of CDS maintain a computer cannot understand the nuances of medicine even when the technologies have been shown to improve efficiencies and outcomes,” said Chang. “It will take time as well as an increase in provider education and pressure from patients, payers and C-level hospital executives.” CDS technologies range from online reference materials to guidelines, to alerts built into electronic prescribing and computerized physician order entry, to data mining and artificial intelligence. Most CDS tools today are targeted to providers and payers, but Chang said governments and even patients would also use CDS to a greater extent in the future. William Bria, MD, chief medical information officer at Shriners Hospitals for Children, recently told an audience at the 2008 Physician-Computer Connection Symposium in Ojai, Calif., that medicine was “at the threshold of a new era in clinical decision support.” Bria said CDS tools in healthcare IT applications could improve patient care, but only if physicians were proactive in William Bria, MD translating care guidelines into CDS technology. “We need to understand which guidelines are actionable and do a good job of translating them for use in CDS,” he said. “If the translation is not done well, we won’t have accomplished much at all.” The Datamonitor report echoes Bria’s concerns. For example, Chang said that while CPOE with CDS is now already widely accepted, it is rarely used appropriately. Physicians complain that too many inappropriate alerts pop up on the computer screen, and as a result, providers begin to ignore the alerts, negating the reason why they were set up in the first place. Chang also cited a general lack of technology adoption and steep financial investment as high barriers to adoption. “If Facebook is able to predict who an individual might be friends with based on who he/she is already friends with, why shouldn’t CDS be able to determine what diagnosis patients may have based on their health information?” she asked. The Datamonitor report suggests that as more facilities adopt EHRs, the amount of clinical data available for research – and translation into CDS technology – will grow exponentially, but healthcare practitioners must have the tools “with patient lives at stake, technology vendors need to do more than pay lip service to the topic of iNTeRopeRaBliTy.” – Christine Chang necessary to analyze it. Chang thinks one effective step healthcare could take would be to apply business intelligence tools to clinical as well as to financial data, allowing organizations to measure outcomes and find the most cost effective procedures. Violet Shaffer, vice president and global agenda manager at Gartner Research, predicts the most “advanced clusters” of the healthcare industry will use clinical and business intelligence to improve care over the next decade. Indeed, she says clinical and business intelligence should be the “number one priority” for healthcare CIOs. “Leveraging clinical data to benchmark and do predictive mod- eling is really hard,” Shaffer said at the 2008 Computer-Physician Connection Symposium. “But to do it well, and to achieve care process agility, you have to transform the enterprise and medicine generally.” Datamonitor ’s Violet Shaffer report notes that while the technology holds much promise, without interoperability the capabilities of CDS will be limited. Chang said healthcareITNews.com e ●connect: CDS 0808 [ cynergy ] The advantageous combination of uniquedesign, power and elements. Cynergy by CompuCaddy. A lightweight cart that's heavy on power. Designed for effortless mobility and equipped with the most advanced power system in the industry. CompuCaddy 800.264.4734 www.compucaddy.com e ● connect: CoMPUCaDDY 0808 http://www.HealthcareITNews.com http://HealthcareITNews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9692 http://www.compucaddy.com http://www.compucaddy.com

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

Healthcare IT News - August 2008 Contents Closer to IT Bill PHIN or RHIOs? Making Leaps After the Flood Tidal Change Denmark Bound Bridging the Divide Robot That Could Mobile Computing Data Everywhere

Healthcare IT News - August 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.