Hospitals, Health IT

Health IT Week: Interoperability has improved, but much work remains

That was the theme Wednesday afternoon in the opening session of the HIMSS Policy Summit in Washington.

So much has happened in the 10 years since the first National Health IT Week, yet so much remains to be done.

That was the theme Wednesday afternoon in the opening session of the HIMSS Policy Summit in Washington, a part of health IT Week that includes time to lobby members of Congress.

To wit: Pat Wise, vice president of health information systems for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, said that candidates for HIMSS’ Davies Awards of Excellence are no longer just touting how they use IT to document patient encounters. They are discussing how they analyze data for quality and performance improvement. “We’re talking about optimization” of health IT systems, Wise said.

Still, plenty of pieces are missing, as this week’s release of a federal roadmap to interoperability demonstrated.

Dr. Brian Jacobs, CMIO and CIO at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, said that data sharing is improving, but recipients often don’t show interest in the messages they receive. “We’re getting pretty good at pushing information around in healthcare,” he said. “We can see it, but we can’t really do anything with it yet.”

Jacobs noted that he hopes for significant improvement in usability of health information in the near future.

Leslie Kelly Hall, senior VP of Boise, Idaho-based consumer health education provider Healthwise, said that healthcare still is not taking advantage of patients as a resource. People look at their cell phones an average of 110 times a day, she said. “Why not use that to improve your health?”

Wise generally praised federal policy-makers for promoting health IT over the last decade, but said, “There’s a couple of policy levers we’re missing here in the United States.”

She noted that a Canadian hospital, Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences, just won the 2015 Davies Enterpise Award. On that side of the border, providers get claims data in real time, and Wise said that knowing that a patient has picked up medication from a pharmacy is particularly important in behavioral health. While each Canadian province has a single-payer system, insurers in the U.S. keep the same types of claims records; they just don’t usually share with providers in real time.

“We have not hit the Easy Button in healthcare,” Wise quipped.

Photo: Flickr user ttarasiuk

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