MU fight continues

In the health IT headlines this week was yet another effort to refocus the Meaningful Use program.

Led by the American Medical Association, a coalition of 111 medical societies sent letters for congressional leaders urging them to intervene on Stage 3. The coalition said that Stage 2 has "largely been a failure, with only 12 percent of physicians successfully participating and little improvement in data exchange across care settings."

The coalition asked Congress to refocus MU to achieve a "truly interoperable system of EHRs that will support, rather than hinder, the delivery of high quality care."

MU success "hinges on a laser-like focus on promoting interoperability and allowing innovation to flourish as vendors respond to the demands of physicians and hospitals rather than the current system where vendors must meet the ill-informed check-the-box requirements of the current program," the coalition wrote. 

Also this week was our coverage from the 2015 Connected Health Symposium, where the speakers touched on big data, cybersecurity, patient engagement and more.

Joichi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, said the traditional peer-reviewed, disciplinary, federally-funded research model is too narrow “considering the things we need to bring to bear. Research universities and large companies are ill-equipped to bring in the talent and thinking needed. Many different disciplines are involved in healthcare today, but the industry isn’t well designed to take advantage of all the technology, Ito said.

These different disciplines have evolved, but slowly. Funding also has been slow to keep up, he said. "Funding fails to cover the spaces between disciplines which are really rich with potential. This raises questions about how we do science."

When asked about the future of connected health, Ito said “the potential of technology is tremendous but won’t be deployed unless we fix some of the broken incentive models.” He talked about how there is incentive to deliver fixes but not necessarily to eliminate problems. However, "we’re understanding the human body in fundamentally new ways, especially in personalized medicine. All of technology should be fully integrated with medicine.”

Beth Walsh

Clinical Innovation + Technology editor