Welcome to EHRReporting!  This blog will cover technology as it relates to the medical field!

What makes a good EMR (electronic medical record) system

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

With Obama becoming the new president one of his goal is to have EMR for every individual by the year 2014.  First of all, let’s clarify what is EMR (electronic medical records).  An electronic medical records system typically is referring to the software a clinic or hospital uses to store patient data and to create a patient work flow.

In some ways, president Obama is looking for PHR (personal health records).  In the grand vision, a patient can go to a clinic and provides his/her credentials, and have the EMR at the clinic or hospital integrate his/her personal information at admission.  The diagnosis and treatment will then be build base on a patient’s previous medical records.  Where is the patient data stored you ask?  The is among the biggest challenge.  Security is the foremost issue that comes to mind.  It is a good question and it will need to be addressed by both government policy and technology.

In order to provide better health care through technology, I believe three different phases will have to occur.

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16.07.2009 health care IT No Comments

Obama’s healthcare IT plans

Friday, July 10th, 2009

During the presidential campaign, one of the key focus of president Obama is to invest in healthcare IT in order lower the cost and provide better care.  In essence, there were talks regarding a “affordable, accessible health care coverage for every American.”  One way in which he plans on achieving the healthcare reform is through investment in healthcare technology.

From Obama’s website change.gov, he is planning on investment 10 billion a year for the next 5 years in hope to gain a wide adoption of healthcare technology that includes electronic Health records (ehr).

How much is 10 billion a year for 5 years?  Let’s do some analysis.

According to AHA’s Hospital Statistics there are approxmiately 6000 hospitals in US not counting clinics.
if the fund is distributed directly to each hospital:
$10 billion / 6000 hospitals = $1,666,666.67

This does seem like an aweful lot of money.  However, if we look at the way enterprise software is structured for the past 10 years, 1.7 million is no where close enough to cover the cost of hardware, software, the cost of an IT team and training.  This is not considering the fact that currently there are not enough qualified IT professional to support Obama’s ambitious plan.

10.07.2009 health care IT No Comments

Details on Health Care IT in the stimulus package

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

John Glaser, VP and CIO at Partners HealthCare System has more details on US Stimulus Package regarding Health care IT:
* Provision of $40,000 in incentives (beginning in 2011) for physicians to use an EHR
* Creation of HIT Extension Programs that would facilitate regional adoption efforts
* Provision of funds to states to coordinate and promote interoperable EHRs
* Development of education programs to train clinicians in EHR use and increase the number of health care IT professionals
* Creation of HIT grant and loan programs
* Acceleration of the construction of the National Health Information Network (NHIN)

As someone who recently moved into health care IT from traditional software engineering, I can see where training will definitely need to play a big role.  However, one the issue that I encountered the most is working with domain knowledge experts.  Take pharmacist for an example.  They believed they have much better knowledge regarding drugs yet they have no clue when it comes to data structure and how better to store that information.  In order to put the health care IT into good use, the usage of some sort of reporting system is inevitable.  As a result, I found myself often try to bridge the gap with the subject experts rather than working on the technology aspect of the problem.

As a whole, the health care IT is definitely gaining momentum.  Even Cramer is on board with health care IT.
Companies such as Allscript, Epic, and Cerner will be garnering much more attention in the upcoming days.

05.07.2009 health care IT, health care policies No Comments

Personal Health records

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

I saw this article on ReadWriteWeb the other day regarding how personal health records are not being adopted

The most interesting part about that article is not the article itself but the comments that were left by its readers.  As an individual working in the health care domain, I have a chance to get some training at Epic System  (One of the major vendors of Health care IT).  During one of my trips to Wisconsin, I met an entire airplane of people all from Kaisers.  I was simply in awe by the amount of resources Kaiser is pouring into health care IT (Epic).  Will it work?  I believe it.  Yet, it will take the same scale similar to what Kaiser is implementing.

Their system will in synced across California in which you can walk into any Kaiser and they will have your health information stored and ready.  By building a system from ground up, they can remove the doubt regarding information is tied to a specific hospital location.  In this sense, Kaiser is definitely a company to watch as they have enough resources and hospitals to be viewed as a microcosm of our healthcare system.

11.01.2009 health care IT No Comments

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