What kind of technology are we talking about? The ideal platform can measure utilization and determine if care adheres to certain evidence-based measures. Many insurers already employ this kind of analysis, but it is likely to be new in most provider organizations.
Today’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that the community data pooling organization, Wisconsin Health Information Organization (WHIO), has launched a database that will now be available to large healthcare systems and, eventually, to consumers. The database will improve transparency and allow better understanding of healthcare quality and cost dynamics:
The database is drawn from the experiences of more than 1.6 million people and 72 million treatment services. In April, WHIO will add data from Dean HMO and Medicaid, which includes BadgerCare, the state health program for the working poor, adding the experiences of 1 million more insured people to the database.
“To us, the real opportunity is to look across all the claims aggregated here and get a picture of where we have cost-effective health care being delivered in Wisconsin, and where we have an opportunity to improve the cost-effectiveness of health care,” said Karen Timberlake, secretary of the state Department of Health Services and a WHIO board member.
“There isn’t a database like this that’s been available to providers to measure these sorts of things. And if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” said Larry Rambo, chief executive of Humana’s Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois markets.
Wisconsin is among a handful of states – including Minnesota, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington – that have put infrastructures in place for pooling health data to improve quality and transparency, according to a briefing paper written this year by the consulting and actuarial company Milliman.
Click here for more information on these information exchanges.
Pogue: What about the interoperability problem? Every software company selling these systems puts the data in a different format.
Blumenthal: We’re doing a lot in this office to try to minimize that problem. We’re gonna be helping states to create interoperability capability, capabilities to link records, to link institutions.
And we’re developing standards at the national level to make it possible for records to talk to each other. And then we’re also gonna be certifying records, to give physicians and hospitals some guidance about the capabilities of those records, so that they’ll know in advance whether or not the records are gonna be able to talk to each other.
These [standards discussions] are open processes. This will all be a very open and transparent process.
The interoperability problem is, of course, a big one—as explained here.
But one aspect of EHR adoption has been largely overlooked. A new healthcare reform briefing paper by Rich Moyer and Paul Leonardo examines how population-level analysis is key to unlocking the potential of electronic health records. Community data pooling allows analysis that makes healthcare quality more apparent and can help measure and improve the system on a regional basis. These information exchanges are currently operational in at least five states and are already yielding results (while hopefully preventing the formation of new information silos in the move toward EHR).
Ron Sims, Rich Moyer, Gail Graham, and Scott Armstrong continue to respond to Wednesday’s question about adoption of electronic health records.
Transcript:
Ron Sims: The original question was, “Who is going to come with the standards?” And I believe you’re going to see the Federal Government move on them with a great deal of aggression over the next couple of years, and there’s several reasons why. If you look at the issues that the three car companies face, one of the things that they’ve been raising on a pretty consistent basis is their healthcare costs, not only their pension costs, but their healthcare costs.
This video is the first of many from the Dec. 1 Healthcare Town Hall. The question was submitted by Curt Small via LinkedIn and answered by Rich Moyer, who is the product manager for MedInsight.
Curt asked:
“Given the sensitive nature of personal medical records, what should be the respective roles of government and for-profit industry in bringing electronic medical records to bear? Criticisms are often heard regarding government inefficiency and failure to bring such products to market, while industry has as its principle goal profits and the accommodation of shareholders.”
For submitting this question, Curt Small is a finalist in our question contest. Congratulations, Curt.
Transcript:
Rich Moyer: I think it’s a really difficult tension to manage. I think, listening to the panelists up here, you realize there are very different visions about where the data sits and who has control over it. You have providers whom the EHR [Electronic Health Records] is centered around, the provision of care. You have the HealthVault look, which is the data’s health, you know, by a corporation or a government entity. I think there needs to be a healthy discussion about, first, starting with
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