Health IT is great. Health IT is terrible.
We all can find evidence to support both statements. In fact, I did, just with a quick check of social media.
Thursday, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, which, among other things, is the nation’s No. 1 health IT cheerleader, shared a new infographic. It paints an awfully rosy picture of the current state of health IT, specifically in the area of consumer access.
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Those are encouraging numbers, except that, as a New England Journal of Medicine article pointed out this month, view/download/transmit is not exactly consumer-friendly in its current form. Patients have to log into multiple portals, even from the same organization, and data liquidity remains a pipe dream in a lot of ways.
We also discussed this a bit in a MedHeads episode I hosted a week ago.
Then I saw this tweet from Wednesday:
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Seen today in Maryland. #letdoctorsbedoctors CC: @zdoggmd #HealthIT pic.twitter.com/07IgrtP8x2
— Liz Cramer (@oncELLEogy) January 27, 2016
My initial reaction was either the practice was struggling with ICD-10, which became mandatory Oct. 1, or that it was staging a passive-aggressive protest against Meaningful Use, which is not actually a mandate. Providers don’t have to participate in Meaningful Use, though they do face a penalty if they don’t meet the standards — but only if they participate in Medicare, which also is optional.
Cramer has since told me via Twitter that she believes the problem does stem from ICD-10. This goes against what I’ve heard and reported from a higher level that the transition to the new coding system was mostly smooth.
In any case, it does seem like we live in parallel universes of health IT.
Photo: Twitter user Elisabeth Cramer