Doctor’s offices and hospitals have slowly started the difficult switch from outmoded paper records to sophisticated electronic systems in a bid to improve care and cut costs.
Making records more accessible is a big part of the effort. Complicating matters, though, is that the industry still has to figure out how to ensure the records don’t get locked into just one health care provider’s computer network and can instead follow patients as they move around.
Studies have found that fewer than 10 percent of U.S. health care providers are using electronic medical records.
“It’s increasingly frustrating for us and other providers that it’s difficult to find a workable interface,” said Dr. James. E. Sanders, chief of staff for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Kansas City Medical Center. “Our systems don’t talk to each other.”
Interoperability, or allowing providers to share records and view them from anywhere, is a requirement for facilities to receive some of the more than $17 billion in stimulus funding the government is offering to encourage adoption of electronic medical records. Congress likely will penalize providers who aren’t using them by 2014, cutting their Medicaid and Medicare payments.
But the debate over interoperability among health care providers, which has been going on for years, could take well beyond the 2014 timeframe to be solved, industry experts say.
“A private sector effort started 11 years ago and is still a going concern,” said Carla Smith, executive vice president of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. “Every year they solve an X number of problems. They’re eating the elephant one bite at a time.”
For an integrated system to work, developers have to agree on how their hundreds of programs present information and connect with each other. For example, if one uses its own set of abbreviations, the information would be useless to a doctor who uses a different program.
Some envision a “network of networks” that would resemble the model used in the banking industry for customers to access accounts through ATMs nationwide.
A survey this year by Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit firm eHealth Initiative found 57 health information exchange groups were operating in the U.S., up from 32 in 2007.
Dr. David Blumenthal, the Obama administration’s health information technology director, acknowledged a national system for sharing records is far off. He said federal officials hope to issue regulations controlling how medical information is shared by the middle of next year and plan to provide about $300 million in stimulus funds to develop regional and local information exchanges. (AP)
