“[Doctors] are overloaded on data entry and yet rampantly under-informed.”
-Andy Slavitt at Health Datapalooza
This quote from Andy Slavitt at Health Datapalooza has really stuck with me. He calls it the physician data paradox. It’s an ugly paradox and is at the heart of so many doctors discontent with EHR software. Andy Slavitt is spot on with his analysis. Doctors spend hours entering all of this data and get very little return value from that data or the volume of health data that is being captured.
My friend Dr. Michael Koriwchak has made an interesting request. In a recent blab interview he was on he said that CMS should only require the collection of data they’re actually going to use.
My guess is that the majority of meaningful use data would not need to be collected if Dr. Koriwchak’s rule was in place. CMS hasn’t really even collected the data from doctors, so they’re certainly not using it. Some of the principles of meaningful use would still exist like interoperability and ePrescribing, but we wouldn’t be turning our doctors into data entry clerks of data that’s not being used.
Think about the reality of meaningful use data collection: CMS doesn’t use the data. Clinicians don’t use the data.
We’ve basically asked doctors and other medical staff to spend millions of hours collecting a bunch of data that’s not being used. Does that make sense to anyone? You could make the argument that the data collection is creating a platform for the future. There’s some value in this thinking, but that’s pretty speculative spending. Why not do this type of speculative data collection with small groups who get paid for their efforts and then as they discover new healthcare opportunities? We can expand the data collection requirement to all of healthcare once doctors can do something meaningful with the data they’re being required to collect.
In fact, what if we paid docs for telling CMS or their EHR vendor how EHR data could be used to benefit patients? I’d see this similar to how IT companies pay people who submit bug reports. Not using health data the right way is kind of like reporting a bug in the health system. Currently, there’s no financial incentive for users to share their best practices and discoveries. Sure, some of them do it at user conferences or other conferences, but imagine how much more interested they’d be in finding and sharing health data discoveries if they were paid for it.
If we finally want to start putting all this health data to work, we’re going to have to solve the physician data paradox. Leveraging the power of the crowd could be a great way to improve the 2nd part of the paradox.