LAubol

I work on the HIT vendor side of things and don’t see this as a money problem, nor do I feel we need a Nasa-like focus on connecting every doctor to every hospital in support of every patient in the country driven by the gov’t.

Industry MUST provide simple (little to no training req’d), effective (outcomes/admin) and affordable HIT for physicians that enables them to appropriately share relevant clinical data/history with providers anywhere in the country without losing control of the patient relationship or their practice. So far, industry has failed to do so and physicians have acted COMPETELY rationally in not purchasing what has been presented to them as “21st century medicine:” Complex, expensive, confusing and not friendly towards physicians.

Tony made a GREAT point regarding hospitals. Some have LOTS of money to play with and others are closing departments just across town. Many reasons for all that not relevant to this discussion, but the fact is EVERY hospital is feeling the pinch right now (and will for years) yet each CIO must figure out some way of aligning community-based physicians, delivery networks, etc. with the significant internal HIT investments they’ve made to further enhance not only patient care across the community, but their own profitability as well.

My company works with a large hospital system that spent untold MILLIONS of dollars and years to deploy one of the most recognized names in EMR-land (GREAT company) for their in-patient services and are now trying to extend the ambulatory version into the community. The system can’t GIVE away licenses to the community doctors because the physicians don’t want to feel beholden to that one hospital or system.

I have supported three different industries migrate from paper to digital workflows during my civilian career, and Healthcare is doing the same thing the others did: try to digitize paper-based practices/processes focused on creating perfection with some future potential ROI rather than creating good enough, showing value NOW and innovating towards “perfection” over time as the “users” learn what the really need/don’t in the “new age.” Each “mature” IT-enabled industry I’ve worked with follows the latter path…

Wow, that was some good coffee! Sorry for the long note… THANKS for your blog. Please keep posting!

Medicare, Medicaid, VA, how many examples of pure gov’t screw ups in health care do we need before this begins sounding like a bad idea.

Let me manage my own health care, keep the gov’t's mitts off of it; it’s non of their business.

Couple that with the fact that the majority of hospitals are not huge 400+ bed facilities in downtown Atlanta. They are the 80 bed hospitals barely scraping by in rural Arkansas. Hospitals that even if they were given a great new free software upgrade wouldn’t have the expertise or funds to implement it.

We still have a long way to go – there’s definitely a problem, and the market hasn’t been fixing that on it’s own. The first step would unfortunately be mandating a simpler set of information transfer standards that all vendors would need to implement. Just throwing money at the problem isn’t going to solve it.