Healthcare Town Hall

The health IT industry continues to debate the definition of “meaningful use” of electronic health records. The term “meaningful use” was set as a standard in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and continues to evade easy definition.

Stepping outside the technical discussion, many communities are seeing a meaningful use of technology in the form of data-pooling initiatives. The Seattle-based Puget Sound Health Alliance today launched the latest version of its community scorecard, which offers transparency for health consumers looking for more information about care providers. Efforts such as these can help tie together disparate information from various different sources into a accessible and interoperable resource that can help inform care decisions.

Electronic Health Records, Transparency EHR, meaningful use, Puget Sound Health Alliance

Jim Schibanoff, Editor-in-Chief of Milliman Care Guidelines; Ron Sims, King County Executive; and Mike Kreidler, Washington State Insurance Commissioner, give their final thoughts at Healthcare Town Hall.

Transcript:

Q: We just have a few minutes left. I’d like to use them to ask you to think for a moment: Is there anything here that you think is important to say about electronic health records that didn’t get said or any final thought you’d like to leave our audience with here in the hall and on TVW?

Jim Schibanoff: Well, I don’t think we’ve touched on the research potential of the electronic health record databases. At huge institutions like Kaiser and the VA, they use EHR as a research tool to look for things like complications of drugs. The best example is, there was this new pain medicine, COX-2, C-O-X 2, that replaced a pain medicine that caused intestinal bleeding. So these COX-2 inhibitors were the great development in pain relief. At Kaiser, they found that, with their very large databases, they found that COX-2 inhibitors caused heart attacks, and most of them were taken off the market. And it was through the power of these very large databases that they became a tremendous research tool, and I think this whole field holds great promise for our research frontier.

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Electronic Health Records, Government, Quality of Care, Reform, Research, Universal coverage EHR, Electronic Health Records, Healthcare, Jim Schibanoff, Mike Kreidler, Puget Sound Health Alliance, Research, Ron Sims, Universal coverage