Good news from New England

Mary Stevens, editor, CMIO magazine

The second annual “Heath IT: Improving Healthcare and the Economy” regional conference brought health IT practitioners, industry leaders and ideas to Worcester, Mass., for a progress report on an array of initiatives in the six-state region. The breakout sessions showed that, when it comes to IT transforming processes, there’s good news in New England.

For starters, all-payor claims databases, which started in Maine, are now in place in most New England states, offering secondary use of claims data that provide a clearer snapshot of ailments and locations of care. And these databases can complement clinical databases to do even more, said Josephine Porter, deputy director of the New Hampshire Institute for Health Policy and Practice, speaking at the conference.

Massachusetts’ Regional Extension Center has reached its provider enrollment goal—and is the first (and so far only) REC to do so, said Fadesola Adetosoye, MS, project officer of the REC program at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, during her presentation. The state’s REC has also helped 114 providers adopt an EHR, with more in the process, she said.

Partners HealthCare’s Center for Connected Health, which began as a “crazy” idea in 1995, is now a leader in providing telemedicine applications and expertise for delivering better care where and when patients need it, according to center director Joseph Kvedar, MD.

The innovations will continue in part because the meaningful use framework has galvanized the health IT industry, said former ONC chair David Blumenthal, MD, in his keynote address at the conference. Also at the event, Sachin Jain, MD, senior advisor to the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, called for more outside-the-box thinking, and said good ideas will find a home in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.

Plenty more good ideas are needed, and soon—other news this week included a report from the Massachusetts Medical Society that showed wait times are rising for most of the specialties included in its survey. In addition, a significant number of physicians in these specialties are not accepting new patients, nor welcoming the state’s low-cost insurance options. At the national level, the 2011 Milliman Medical Index showed that the cost of healthcare for a family of four covered by a preferred provider organization was $19,393 in 2011. Although the increase over 2010 was the smallest annual rise in more than 10 years, at 7.3 percent it’s still far above the rate of inflation.

Can health IT innovate us out of rising costs and longer patient waits? Let me know your recommendations at mstevens@trimedmedia.com.

 
Mary Stevens, editor