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Federal Deadline Hobbling eHealth IT Rollout
Lucas123 writes "A federal deadline that begins next year and requires hospitals to prove they're meaningfully using electronic health records will lead to technical problems and data errors affecting patient care, say politicians and top IT professionals responsible for the deployments. Physicians and hospitals have until the end of 2011 to receive the maximum federal incentive monies to deploy the technology. If not deployed by 2015, they face penalties through cuts in Medicare reimbursements. 'I think we have nontechnology people making decisions about technology,' said Gregg Veltri, CIO at Denver Health. 'I wonder if anybody understands the reality of IT systems and how complex they are, especially when they're integrated together. You're going to sacrifice quality if you increase the speed [of the rollout].'"
Slow, Bad, Expensive, pick 1...
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
It's not like anything bad's ever happened when critical systems are rolled-out untested, unprepared, or irresposibly.
I mean it's not like someone's life is ever put in jeaopardy by minor software glitches, especially in hospitals. ...on a side note, Googling "IT disasters" leads to some very interesting results.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
On the other hand, look at the digital TV transition debacle.
If you don't set a deadline and enforce it, difficult technology implementations tend to drag on forever.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
The clear solution is to just not put a deadline on it at all. Surely that will result in quality systems, right? I mean, it's not like they can put this off indefinitely... can they? Oh.
i know people that work in the medical field and a lot of hospitals already have electronic charts. people i know have worked with them for years. going back to 2005 or earlier as far as i can remember.
I bet this is another case of the leftovers crying about investing money in infrastructure that will save them money in the long run but they see it as an expense and fight it. just like the genius MBA's at Dell and HP who concentrated on volume and tight margins while Apple went the opposite direction. Now Mac sales are growing by double digits, profits are rolling in from boring things like computer sales, the prices compared to higher end Dell/HP computers are comparable on the same specs most of the time, and Apple has a much better brand name. And they don't have Asus and Acer taking away their market share
Clearly there are a lot of people here posting about how the government should not be getting involved and that seems to be the bias of both the article and summary. Allow me to go into some personal experience here though. As someone who has been very ill, lack of standardized medical records and the inability of various hospitals to transfer digital copies of video and images resulted in my spending another month or so of my life in a state I would not wish upon anyone. Right now a very good friend of mine works in healthcare and they have been (I shit you not) writing down patient information on recipe cards as the one and only method of storing drug prescription info. This resulted in, by her count, several hundred patients not getting needed insulin, antipsychotics, and other drugs as a result of numerous ordering errors that were never caught and were impossible to search for. So when people say digitizing medical records in a standard fashion is going to result in problems for patients... well not doing it is resulting in the very same.
I'm not big on government interference with many parts of our lives, but they are addressing a very real problem and they're doing it with kid gloves. They did not pass regulations requiring hospitals to comply, they just tied federal funding to that compliance and gave the hospitals many years in which to get their shit together. If medical providers have not done so and are rushing about now, that is absolutely not the fault of the feds.
After reading the posts here I felt compelled to respond to several points raised:
1. "Great software developers entering the field today aspire to work on pop culture technology like Facebook, Google, and CG animated film production. Who does that leave to work on hospital IT? Does hospital IT pay well enough to compete with the sexy IT jobs?"
Yes. It pays quite well and with federal dollars flowing there is a HUGE push to implement and integrate EMR technology. There are development gigs that pay more, but not a lot more (in either number of open positions or dollars).
2. "Non technology people dictating the technology sector. Obama does not have an ounce of knowledge about health care systems, yet thinks he knows everything that should be done. It's a farce."
True - Obama doesn't know about health care systems - Nor does he need to. "He" is not dictating the "how" just the "what". That seems appropriate for the Federal Government. In terms of actual Federal input - it's pretty minimal - maybe even more minimal than desired. They are certainly driving the industry in a good way (towards integrated health records) - but have not even specified format or protocol - much less the "single repository" that so many are afraid of. The private sector - rightly or wrongly - has standardized on HL7 (v2 mostly from what I've seen - too bad really - v3 is XML while v2 is a bit arcane - pipe ("|") and carat ("^") delimited).
3. Deadline : Plain and simple, without a deadline the industry would easily take another 20 years to get fully automated.
4. "I bet this is another case of the leftovers crying about investing money in infrastructure that will save them money in the long run but they see it as an expense and fight it."
Because of the stimulus package no one is fighting it. On the contrary - any given EMR is now reporting a six month backlog to integrate.