RSS 2.0 FeedMay 2009, Technology
The Skinny on Electronic Medical Records
There’s a $19B silver bullet in the Obama stimulus package that provides incentives for doctors and hospitals to move to Electronic Medical Records and the deal is pretty sweet.
There’s a $19B silver bullet in the Obama stimulus package that provides incentives for doctors and hospitals to move to Electronic Medical Records and the deal is pretty sweet. Bottom line is that if you implement this for your doctor’s office, the government will write you a check to pay for it. There are lots of good things I’d do if I’d be totally reimbursed. How about solar panels? A hybrid car?
The bottom line is that this is an incentive that is pretty much guaranteed to work - we will have Electronic Medical Records in a couple of years, and $19B will flow into the economy to pay for software, computers and consulting services. Yeah!
So how do people feel about this? Well, the smart people at NPR, Kaiser Family Health and Harvard School of Public Health were curious about this too, so they surveyed 1,238 people to find out. The results are in and 75 percent of respondents said that moving to electronic medical records was somewhat or very important. Pretty good so far! But then they asked whether this would lower health care costs and 70 percent said no. In fact, 35 percent said they expected electronic medical records to increase health care costs. Can’t win ‘em all…
At the end of the day, putting information in a computer doesn’t generally make things cheaper, and in the case of electronic medical records, the value will come when health information can be shared. I attended the Health Information Management Systems Symposium (HIMMS) in Chicago early in April and the main message, not surprisingly, was “I can do your electronic medical record – pick me!” But, happily the main topic of conversation among the health care information technology geeks was that it’s time to talk about interoperability. So maybe we are stimulating some good thinking after all. Way to go Obama!
Two of the big hits of the show were Microsoft and Google. Now, nobody is generally surprised when Microsoft and Google make splashes in technology shows, but in health care this was somewhat of a first. Both of these companies were there to talk about their offerings for Patient Health Record systems. Google calls theirs Google Health, and Microsoft’s offering is called Microsoft Health Vault. So what are these, and how do they relate to electronic medical records?
Google Health and Microsoft Health Vault are systems that allow patients (meaning all of us), to control our own health information. We can sign up today and start sharing information about our health histories. That’s all well and good, but who wants to type in their health history? Not me! The better news is that you can connect to ever growing list of collaborators with Microsoft and Google and pull your information from there. Maybe they’re onto something. I asked one of the guys in the Microsoft booth how they were going to make money with this, and the answer I was given was “Nobody knew how to make money with the Internet in 1996, but eventually people figured it out.” Of course many people learned how to lose money too…
I personally have a fairly optimistic view here, not only about how money can be made, but more importantly how healthcare can be changed for the better. And the reason I’m writing about it here, is because the convergence of technologies talked about in Telemedia Strategies are key enablers for the transformation. Check back in coming months for a series of visionary articles about this transformation. I’ll give you a hint where this is going. Rather than the doctor and the hospital being the central figures and venues in the way health care works, the patient will become the central figure and the home will become the venue. Stay tuned!
Ken Accardi is the principal at the consulting firm Albion Ventures, LLC. Ken serves as CIO in Residence for MedNest LLC, a health care technology incubation firm, and as CTO for Ankota, Inc. an emerging leader in Healthcare Delivery Management (HDM). Previously Ken was CIO for a a division of GE Healthcare, and served in two technology Vice President roles, including VP of Quality and Business Process for Tele Atlas (recently sold to Tom Tom). Ken holds an MBA from Babson College, an MS in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, and a BS in Engineering from Bucknell University. Ken lives with his wife and two children in the Boston metropolitan area.