Research, big ideas and leadership above the fog

Mary Stevens, editor, CMIO

The U.S. Senate voted down a budget proposal that included an overhaul of Medicare. So no vouchers, for a while, at least.Then on Thursday, Vermont’s governor signed legislation to create a state-level single-payor healthcare system. These events illustrate that healthcare legislation is all over the map, in more ways than one.

Above and beyond the political fog, healthcare improvement research continues apace. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association that investigated the correlation of primary care physician distribution to patient outcomes showed that adding primary care physicians (PCPs) in and of itself won’t necessarily generate an uptick in outcomes; training those PCPs in ambulatory care might have a more positive effect.

If future studies bear these findings out, it could have ramifications for federal healthcare education policy, and for patient-centered medical home and accountable care organizations, all of which rely on PCP-led care teams for success.

A larger local workforce of PCPs has a generally positive benefit for Medicare populations, but this association may not simply be the result of having more physicians trained in primary care in an area, the study stated. “Instead, associations were much stronger with a measure of primary care activity that was linked to a central concept of primary care—ambulatory care delivered in an office or clinic setting by physicians trained in primary care,” the authors stated.

In Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, another study looked at how medical data mining could expose adverse drug events that were in the literature, but previously unseen. Prescription drugs can be associated with adverse effects that are unrecognized despite evidence in the medical literature, according to the findings.

Finally, CMIO is taking entries for its Small Hospitals, Big Ideas awards. Do you know of a smaller facility (fewer than 150 beds) that has harnessed health IT in a unique way to solve a patient-care problem, streamline workflows or improve the quality of patient care—with measurable results? Contact me at mstevens@trimedmedia.com with your nominations. We’re especially interested in hearing from rural health organizations, critical access hospitals or other others that have an internal IT department, even if it’s an army of one. The top five Big Ideas will be featured in the August issue of CMIO and online.

Also, a few spots are still open at the CMIO Summit Clinical IT Leadership Forum in Boston on June 10. Click here for more information.

Mary Stevens
Editor of CMIO