Transformation in small steps

Mary Stevens, Editor

Although individual practitioners and healthcare systems are adopting new IT approaches at almost every level of care, National Coordinator for Health IT David Blumenthal, MD, is calling for more innovation. The U.S. health system must take full advantage of the computing technology that has transformed virtually every other aspect of modern life, wrote Blumenthal in a recent commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"The administration is trying to do four basic things: define meaningful use, encourage and support the attainment of meaningful use through incentives and grant programs, bolster public trust in electronic information systems by ensuring their privacy and security and foster continued health IT innovation,” he wrote. 

Health information exchange (HIE) technology, a major component of the health IT initiatives, is gaining market momentum, but as market research firm KLAS reports, the number of vendors with a proven, repeatable model for HIE is still small.

The firm examined commercial HIE models from 22 vendors in 89 live HIE organizations that use commercial technologies to share patient data that is being viewed by doctors. All HIEs included in the study had to be exchanging data among facilities that are not owned by the same organization, KLAS stated.

For acute-to-acute HIEs where two or more hospitals or health systems share patient data, Axolotl has the most live HIE clients with seven live acute-to-acute HIE organizations using Axolotl technology, KLAS reported. Epic Systems had seven validated acute-to-acute sites, but Epic's Care Everywhere product connects only Epic software customers, KLAS said. Among acute-to-ambulatory HIEs, where at least one hospital or health system is sharing data with a clinic, lab or other ambulatory facility, Medicity’s Novo Grid led the study with 22 live sites, according to the report.

With so many recent calls for “transparency” in healthcare—another item on the meaningful use agenda—we now turn to medical imaging. As CMIO magazine reported in last month’s issue, clinicians are working to include radiation dosage in EMRs and track dosage over time.

This week, the FDA launched an initiative to reduce unnecessary radiation exposure from CT, nuclear medicine studies and fluoroscopy—the greatest contributors to total radiation exposure within the U.S. population, according to the agency. Among other things, the initiative seeks to increase patient awareness of their own exposure, and to work with providers to build one or more national registries for radiation doses. If patients’ cumulative dosages were included in EMRs, that data could eventually populate a dose registry, providing another layer of information to help the agency and providers develop and refine acceptable thresholds.

In mergers and acquisitions announced this week, big got bigger: Quality Systems, a provider of inpatient healthcare information systems and connectivity software, has entered into an agreement to acquire Opus Healthcare Solutions. The acquisition will be integrated with the assets of Sphere Health Systems, which Quality Systems, of Irvine, Calif., acquired in August 2009. Both companies will become part of NextGen Healthcare Information Systems, Quality Systems’ wholly owned subsidiary.

How is your facility enlisting transformational technology to optimize healthcare? Let me know at mstevens@trimedmedia.com.