Dr. Joe Scherger discusses how electronic health records can positively affect patient outcomes.
Q: Joe Scherger, we were talking before the event about research that you knew of that has looked into the impact in terms of patient outcomes, that flow from patients taking responsibility for their own care. Why don’t you talk about that?
Joe Scherger, MD: Yes. Actually, some of the work being done in Northern California by Kaiser, in working with a team at Stanford, has shown that patient activation, that is, getting the patient actively involved in their own care, is one of the most powerful things you can do to improve quality, and they’ve got actually a database now of a large number of patients; it shows that the more activated the patients are, the better the results are.
Joe Scherger, MD, Consulting Medical Director, Lumetra, discusses how EHR can change care delivery.
Transcript:
Barry: Joe Scherger, we were talking earlier about your experience with healthcare informatics, which suggests to me that maybe just talking about records may not get fully at the potential benefits that the electronic age presents for improvement of care. Talk about that.
Joe Scherger, MD: No, Barry, I’m most excited about the fact that we’re on the cusp of a whole new way of healthcare delivery. Electronic records in the
Gail Graham, Veterans Health Administration Director of Health Data and Informatics, and Joe Scherger, MD, Consulting Medical Director Lumetra, address this question as panelists at Healthcare Town Hall.
Transcript:
Barry: It sounds like everyone agrees that interoperability and some level of standardization with records and record systems and the language of them is important. Can anybody help me understand how that’s likely to actually be achieved? At the present time, Microsoft has its solution, Google has its solution, I’m sure many other providers working with software solution providers working with pairs and healthcare providers are offering all sorts of other solutions. There’s sort of a cacophony, a Tower of Babel potentially out there right now, am I right?
Gail Graham: Well, I think there are some breakthroughs. VA among about 14 other participants were in a demonstration project to display that we could send summary information of data through the healthcare continuum for patients.
Q: Gail Graham, in the case of the V.A., who owns the patient records in your system?
Gail Graham: Well, by statute, V.A., as the custodian of the record. But the information is actually owned by the patient, and the control and the release of that information is owned by the patient. We do have legal parameters for how we keep it and the duration for which we keep it. But disclosures of that information are established in the Privacy Act and in HIPAA. And I think for us, too, our patients have a long history of maintaining a copy of their record that dates back to their military service. So even before provisions of HIPAA allowed for amendment and getting copies of your records, it was a very commonplace thing for the veterans to keep a copy of their medical record as they moved around.
George Scriban of Microsoft, John Hammarlund of CMS, Dr. Joe Scherger of Lumetra, and Dr. Jim Schibanoff of the Milliman Care Guidelines field the question
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