EMR and EHR Readers, have you already started breaking your New Year Resolutions? I know I have. My New Year resolution was a very unambitious I will exercise at least every other day, and I couldn’t hold on to that for a week. However, all is not lost. Even if you’re falling short on fulfilling your resolutions, you can still make a compelling video on some kinds of health IT related resolutions and maybe walk away with a decent cash prize. Don’t know what I’m talking about?

The Office of National Coordinator on Health IT is hosting a health IT challenge. Participants need to create a short (upto 2 mins) in length video that covers:
a) what your health resolution for 2012 is
b) how you will use IT to fulfill your resolution and
c) how you maintain your resolution using health IT tools.

Here are some examples listed on the ONCHIT website:

I will set up an online personal health record for myself (or another family member) so I can have all of my health information conveniently stored in one place.

I will ask my doctor for a copy of my own health records — electronically if available — and help him or her to identify any important information that may be missing or need to be corrected.

I will find an online community that helps me figure out the best ways to manage my health condition (depression, cancer, diabetes, etc.)

I will use an electronic pedometer to help me track my physical activity and will try to take 10,000 steps per day.

I will find an app on my smartphone to help me track my food intake so I can lose 10 pounds by my high school reunion.

I will sign up for a text reminder program on my cell phone to help me stop smoking or remind me to take my medications on time.

Please note that these are just suggestions, not listed topics. In fact ONCHIT encourages you to get creative and create your own HIT resolutions.

Of course, being as it is 2012, and well into Web 2.0fication of our lives, it’s not enough to make resolutions about improving our health. If you want to participate in the ONCHIT challenege, you’ll have to find ways to incorporate health IT into your resolution. I’ve worked pretty much my whole adult life, barring some exceptions, in the IT industry. But even so, I believe that IT can only solve some classes of problems, so I’m a bit wary when developers and programmers bring their hey-I-can-create-an-app-for-that attitudes whenever they’re confronted with any problems. That said, I do think some aspects of health IT can be useful. And I’m excited to see what creative things people will come up with.

I thought this blog post on the 3M blog made a good point about ACO’s finally having some action behind them thanks to the Pioneer ACO awards that were announced recently. Until now, we’ve basically just had people talking to each other about the idea of an ACO, how an ACO should take shape, etc etc etc. It’s nice to see us starting to move beyond discussion of ACO models and now starting to see some real people and companies that have to start taking some ACO action to see what they can create.

I have a feeling that much of this initial ACO work is going to be like most startup companies: failures. In the startup world, it’s just expected that at least 9 of 10 companies will fail. That’s part of the algorithm of innovation that has worked so well in the entrepreneurial environment we know as tech startup companies. I imagine we’ll see the same with a bunch of these ACO models in healthcare as well.

One major problem I do have with this comparison is that the ACO programs that we see now aren’t entrepreneur or market driven, but instead are driven by some sort of government money. This means that those that participate have a bunch of perverse incentives.

The blog post mentioned above provides some interesting suggestions on how to improve healthcare. In response I offered these thoughts in their comment section:

The suggestions you make are reasonable and interesting, but they seem to ignore the idea that what people are really going to do with ACO legislation is find the simplest way to extract the most amount of money out of the regulation. There will be some exceptions, but this is how it works with most government programs.

I imagine some will see this as a bit cynical. I personally just see it as realistic. If we want to talk about real solutions we have to talk about the stark realities that face us and not the idealized models that could happen “IF…” ACOs are no different. Enough with the IFs and let’s talk about action.

Casinos can teach the healthcare industry a thing or two about influencing customer behavior. So says this interesting feature in California Healthline this week.

Think about it – if it’s your first time, and you lose 500$ straight off the bat, you’re not likely to head to the nearest ATM to withdraw more cash. The people who run casinos understand this, the article quote California Healthcare Foundation CEO Mark Smith as saying. That’s why casinos have loyalty card systems in place – so they can not only know what you’re doing, and to influence your behavior in a way that benefits the casino.

A casino doesn’t necessarily want a first-time customer to lose money right away, he said, because that customer becomes unhappy and won’t come back. “So if you’re a first-time customer and you’re down 150 bucks, someone in the casino will slide up to you and ask you how you’re doing,” Smith said. “And maybe get you a comp meal or a drink.” The casino intervenes before customers reach the decision point to leave.

For the healthcare industry, the holy grail is patient data. If there is enough patient data, the innovators can come along, interpret it, and hopefully healthcare providers can nudge patient behavior enough to make a change in overall health.

The most interesting thing about the article, to me personally, was reading about how data that has been made publicly available can be used for interesting uses. The article talks how data made public by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fuels such varied things as the Weather Channel, mobile weather apps and so on.

And guess what? All that can happen to healthcare as well. Much public health information is available for access by the general public, and part of the job of HHS has been to make innovators aware that public health data is now available. The article talked about Bing using Hospital Compare data to provide users with hospital comarison statistics.

I followed some of the links on the article and finally ended up at the Health.Data.gov site, where as promised, a treasure trove of data is publicly available – just waiting for the right technogeek to come along and do something cool with it. Could that innovator be you? Go check it out!

Earlier this year I had the good fortune (and the support of my employer) to join the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), an organization that offers interest groups for every possible IT niche you can think of. I’ve attended a few of their health society events, and at every one I’m confronted with statistics and anecdotes surrounding the dearth of qualified healthcare IT professionals in the city and surrounding areas. Much attention at these events is also given to the fact that these professionals are needed now more than ever to help smaller physician practices and larger healthcare systems demonstrate Meaningful Use and achieve associated electronic medical record (EMR) adoption goals.

I’ve commented before on the disconnect between the increasing number of healthcare IT educational opportunities being created by the government and vendors’ willingness (or unwillingness, as the case may be) to hire fresh grads. EJ Fechenda of HIMSS JobMine posed a question related to this conundrum better than I ever could have: “With federal deadlines looming, healthcare organizations need to get moving and there are a lot of job seekers out there ready for the challenge. Are there organizations or companies willing to extend opportunities to these candidates? Is there a training or job-shadowing program that can be used as a best practice for other organizations to implement? Who are the champions already doing this or willing to lead the charge?”

I may have found a champion in Rich Wicker, HIMS Director at Shore Memorial Hospital in New Jersey. Wicker is also an adjunct professor at two HITECH-affiliated community colleges, teaching students who already have strong backgrounds in healthcare or IT the basics of process, analysis, redesign, installation and ongoing maintenance to prepare them for second careers in physician office EMR implementations.

He certainly seems to have a passion for the subject. “I’m devoted to the EMR,” he told me during a recent phone interview. “That’s why I started teaching, really, because I want to see that [adoption] happen so badly.”

He tells me his students are guardedly optimistic about their future job opportunities, which he believes will surge this summer alongside an expected increase in physician adoption of EMRs – six months before the deadline to qualify for Meaningful Use incentives.

As we discussed the state of the HIT job market, we both wondered if what type of organization might have a greater role to play in ensuring that graduate from programs like Wicker’s find jobs.

“We had to really battle our way to get one [software] copy from one EMR vendor,” he explains. “I wish they were more amenable to providing educational software/packages like Apple does throughout all their PCs. I know a few different schools have joined with a vendor. One place I know of is showing Vista, another is showing eClinicalWorks, and another partnered with a local hospital that happens to use Sage.

“I have a relatively limited view, but from what I can see, the vendors are not really engaged with the HITECH student development program. I think they’d probably rather do it themselves.”

“Here’s an idea that I came up with,” he adds. “I’ll throw out the RECs (Regional Extension Centers). That’s another entity that’s funded – it’s kind of their job to get the docs to convert. If they could partner with the colleges and the graduates to possibly divert some of their funding to supplementing the graduates’ income while they worked at a physician practice … So the physician, let’s say, for $5 an hour, they could hire a qualified, certified person. These people are pretty good, too. They know what it is to work. They’ve probably worked 10 or 20 years already, either in IT or in healthcare. So they’re mature employees and highly motivated. They would be great to go in and do a 6-month installation. I think it would be great for the physician if, for $5 an hour, you get somebody that would probably cost you $30 an hour somewhere else.

“Let’s say the student can get another $10 an hour supplemented from the REC or somehow through the government. So they get $15 an hour to go in there … they get four or five months of experience doing an installation and then the physician can make a decision … maybe they ultimately hire the person. That’s just a crazy idea that I had that seemed like the pieces are out there that kind of potentially could work. I sent it into the ONC a couple of days ago.”

Could the RECs have a bigger role to play in ensuring that HITECH graduates gain on-the-job experience and employment? I’d love to hear from any readers out there who may work for or with RECs . Is Wicker’s idea doable? Have we found our champion?

Dr. Sullivan is a practicing cardiologist who joined DrFirst in 2004, just after completing his term as President of the Massachusetts Medical Society. He is known throughout the healthcare industry as the father of the Continuity of Care Record (“CCR”) and a leader on the future of healthcare technology. He is assisting DrFirst in ensuring that Rcopia continues to add the functionality necessary to maintain its leadership position both in electronic prescribing and in the channel of communication between various sectors of the healthcare community and the physician. Dr. Sullivan is active in organized medical groups at the state and national level, and is both a delegate to the AMA and the Chairperson of their Council on Medical Service as well as past Co-Chair of the Physicians EHR Consortium.

The buzz surrounding Electronic Health Records (EHR) is nothing short of constant.  The daunting task of selection, purchase and implementation is quite confusing, technical, and expensive, with many physicians, clinics and health systems uncertain of their needs and questioning how the technology is going to impact the way they practice medicine and their bottom line. It’s all about workflow and productivity.

More recently, Providers are faced with the intimidating task of deciding which kind of system to install. There are all inclusive systems, often referred to as fully paperless or standard EHRs and there are so called a la carte systems known as modular EHRs.

The Case for Modular

Modular EHR systems allow providers to take a stepping stone approach to health IT clinical documentation and order writing, by choosing the tools and functions which make the most sense in their practices and clinics; improving specialized workflow and efficiency.  Going the modular route can gradually ease the provider and the office staff into a more paperless environment without having to make a full and often-times difficult transition to a fully paperless workspace.

There is need for caution however. The sheer volume of modules available can make selecting appropriate ones an overwhelming task.  Not only do clinicians need to be wary of which modules they are choosing, but also what functions have been certified by an authorized organization.

By combining specific modular systems, it can become “qualified,” making the user eligible for the monetary reimbursements set forth by Title IV of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

At DrFirst, our Rcopia-MU^TM has taken all of the guess work out of this process and is a completely certified Modular EHR that physicians can implement and start earning incentive money directly out-of-the-box.

The implementation of a complete EHR system can be confusing and time consuming.  Herein lays some distinct advantages of implementing a modular EHR.  Practices that have already implemented e-prescribing or registry modules may not need to relearn a different system, or move their data from one to another (as long as the current module is certified).

Providers who are considering going the modular route can check the certification status of their options at Certified Health IT Products List. The cost for a modular approach is often much less expensive and providers can select the modules from various vendors to meet their financial and practice-based needs.  Upon implementation, providers must show they’re using certified EHR technology in measureable ways to receive their incentive monies from the Federal Government.  With this very high ROI, many providers see the advantage of using the modular approach to postpone the decision process in selecting a complete EHR and yet at the same time earn Meaningful Use incentive money to put towards the cost of  the much more expensive system.

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, doctors who have not adopted an EHR (either modular or complete) by 2015 will be penalized by Medicare — a 1% penalty to begin, then up to 3% within three years. Many providers are banking on the reimbursement that has been made available by the ARRA to help offset the initial costs.

What is your practice considering, complete EHR or modular? Do you see benefits of one over the other?

I don’t know about the rest of you, but ever since David Blumenthal left ONC he’s had plenty of interesting things to say. I think he’s still somewhat cautious, but you can tell he’s given himself more freedom to comment on the state of EHR software and how it could be improved.

One example of this was in Andy Oram’s writeup of David Blumenthal’s speech in Boston a little while back. Here’s one section of Andy’s write up that really hit me (emphasis mine):

Perhaps Blumenthal’s enthusiasm for putting electronic records in place and seek interoperability later may reflect a larger pragmatism he brought up several times yesterday. He praised the state of EHRs (pushing back against members of the audience with stories to tell of alienated patients and doctors quitting the field in frustration), pointing to a recent literature survey where 92% of studies found improved outcomes in patient care, cost control, or user satisfaction. And he said we would always be dissatisfied with EHRs because we compare them to some abstract ideal

I don’t think his assurances or the literature survey can assuage everyone’s complaints. But his point that we should compare EHRs to paper is a good one. Several people pointed out that before EHRs, doctors simply lacked basic information when making decisions, such as what labs and scans the patient had a few months ago, or even what diagnosis a specialist had rendered. How can you complain that EHRs slow down workflow? Before EHRs there often was no workflow! Many critical decisions were stabs in the dark.

Lots of interesting discussion points there, but the one I take away from it is that there’s no such thing as the perfect EMR. Blumenthal is dead on that many doctors have this abstract ideal of what an EMR should be and it will never be that way. Certainly there are benefits to implementing an EMR, but there are also some challenges to using an EMR as well. No amount of programming and design are going to ever change that.

I wish I could find a description I read 4-5 years ago from an EHR vendor talking about the doctors they liked to work with. In it they described that they liked working with doctors who had reasonable expectations of the EHR implementation. They wanted to work with doctors who wanted to go electronic. They wanted to work with clinics that understood that some change was required as part of any IT implementation. From what I can tell, that EHR vendor has basically done just that.

Reminds me of trying to force my kids to do something they don’t want to do. Never seems to end well. Instead, it’s a much more satisfying experience for all when I help them understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. They still don’t like some of the details in many cases, but at least they understand the purpose for what we’re doing.

As long as doctors cling to some abstract ideal of EMR perfection, no EMR vendor will ever be able to satisfy them. A perfect EMR is not reasonable. Just because an EMR doesn’t offer everything that you could dream, doesn’t mean it’s not an incremental improvement over what you’re doing today.

Don’t let the quest for perfection get in the way of incremental improvement. Perfection is more nearly obtained through many incremental improvement than giant leaps.

Here’s some interesting and potentially important news. According to some recent news items, it seems that Mayo Clinic investigators are putting the finishing touches on a suite of tools which can identify and sort medical data contained in any electronic medical record.

Mayo investigators are working under a federal grant, the $60 million Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program, which is funded by the ONC.

According to a piece in Government HealthIT, the researchers have used natural language processing tools to isolate health data from about 30 digital medical records of patients with diabetes.  So far, so good. When the extracted data is run through specialized systems developed with IBM’s Watson Research Center, the 30 patient records “explode” into 134 *bilion* individual pieces of information, Government HealthIT reports.

Unfortunately, none of the sources I have explain what specific data pieces make up this total, which sounds extremely high to me. If we’re talking about just 30 patients, it’s hard for me to imagine that mundane details of care represent even multiple thousands of data points, unless you’re dealing with decades of care. (Perhaps the information involved includes the coding needed to extract the data — readers, can you clarify this for me perhaps?)

While I can’t testify as to how realistic the Mayo researchers’ claims are, I have to think that if they’re on target, something very big is in the works.  After all, to date I’ve heard little of tools that can effectively, fluidly extract clinical data from an entire EMR-based patient chart regardless of format or data organization. Concepts like natural language processing are far from new, but it seems they haven’t been up to the job.

Not only would  such capabilities allow virtually any set of institutions to share data, a giant leap in and of itself, they would also allow providers to do unprecedented levels of clinical analysis and ultimately improve care.

On the other hand, it’s not clear how practical this approach will be. If it only takes 30 records to generate that much data, just imagine how much data a single mid-sized hospital would have to wrangle!  If I’m reading things right, this technology may remain stuck at the research stage, as it’s hard to imagine most institutions could manage terabytes of new data.

Still, there’s clearly much to learn here. I’m eager to find out whether Mayo’s SHARP technology turns out to be usable in everyday clinical life.

I’m extremely biased in this opinion, but I love that ONC has a healthcare IT blog. I’m sure it still has to go through the government filter, but I love that the members of ONC have a place where they can put out comments and thoughts and receive feedback from the greater community.

One thing that’s beautiful about a blog is that the community of readers often provide as much value in the comments as the writer provides in the commentary. I think that’s a hard shift for many journalists to make since they’ve been so well trained that they are suppose to provide the font of information, cover all angles, research out the facts, etc.

Since I’m not a journalist, this hasn’t been hard for me at all. In fact, one of the main reasons I started this blog was for me to share the information that I had learned and I learned very quickly that when I was wrong that the good people reading my site would be happy to correct me. I’m not sure I’d call all of those corrections a fun experience, but once I put my pride behind me I’m always grateful to be smarter after than I was before.

I imagine that ONC has seen the same thing. They’ve probably heard some comments that were hard for them to hear. However, once they get over those hard things, I’m sure they were grateful to have access to some candid feedback. Argue what you may about the value of meaningful use, certified EHR, and , all of the people from ONC that I’ve met have been very good people trying to do the best they can. I imagine the blog helps them do that even better.

Today, the most interesting thing I heard in the hallway of HIMSS was about ONC and the government’s perspective on the current EHR certification and meaningful use stage 1.

Someone I spoke told me that ONC is vry focused on getting all EHR software certified. It won’t quite be a basic rubber stamp, but ONC-ATCB’s are to work with the EHR vendors to help as many EHR vendors be certified as possible.

Similar to that, ONC wants doctors to easily be able to show meaningful use stage 1. Then, they’ll tighten down on future stages.

On face, this might not seem like a big deal. No doubt, ONC wants as many certified EHR vendors and doctors that are meaningful users as possible.

However, I find it interesting to think that they’re deliberately trying to get as many people as possible meaningfully using a certified EHR even if those users and EHR vendors aren’t likely to be able to comply with future more stringent requirements.

Will this mean we’ll have a whole wave of EHR users having to switch EHR software once the more stringent standards are implemented? Or will doctors just take the meaningful use stage 1 EHR incentive money and then not worry about the rest of the government handout?

I’m not sure the outcome, but it’s definitely something worth thinking about.

I’m not sure how many of you find it interest, but I know I have at least a reasonable number of EHR vendors out there that read this site. Plus, the number of available certified EHR vendors should be interesting to anyone that participates in the industry.

The EMR Daily News recently did a post breaking down the official ONC CHPL list of certified EHR vendors. Here’s my general summary of the numbers:
Total EHR Certifications: 329
Certified Ambulatory EHR: 234
Certified In Patient EHR: 95

I just checked the list myself and found 350 total EHR vendors, 250 ambulatory certified EHR, and 100 Certified In Patient EHR. Although, since those numbers are so round, I’m going to assume that EMR Daily News did a better job looking at the list. I just went off the numbers that the website provided.

Either way, 329 EHR companies is a lot of companies. Granted, that’s not 329 full comprehensive EHR vendors, but the majority of them are or will be. Is there any wonder that there’s such a thirst for tools to help people narrow down the EHR vendor selection process?

EMR Daily news also broke down which ONC-ATCB companies are certifying the 329 EHR vendors:
CCHIT: 54%
Drummond Group: 35%
InfoGard: 11%

I know that SLI is talking to a lot of EHR vendors and I imagine the Verizon associated ATCB is too. Of course, this says to me that there’s still a lot of EHR vendors that are going to be added to this list.

I talked to one industry person about the number of EHR vendors and they said they had 600 on their EHR vendor list. From the looks of this, they might not be all that far off with that number.