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There’s so much going on health IT these days, it’ll make your head spin. Fortunately, it appears a bang-up good job is being done by the health IT team at HHS and the implementers they’re working with.
Example of “head spin” and what’s at stake for consumer/patients: as much as the Society for Participatory Medicine has advocated for data liquidity and “gimme my data,” I only learned yesterday of an astounding statistic that’s been circulating for years:
The typical primary care physician has 229 other physicians working in 117 practices with which care must be coordinated.
And they’ve had to do this with fax machines. Costly manual labor (senseless cost and delays), pieces of paper getting lost and misfiled, confidential data faxed to the wrong number, etc.
Yesterday’s superb webcast about The Direct Project documented how this is already changing: despite skeptics’ protestations that it’ll never happen, projects are already well underway making electronic records transfer a reality in several states among many players. It appears to me that the regulations have been written in a way that successfully shoves things in the right direction, yet puts the apple within reach so people can achieve the goal.
Great work, you guys. More about this later, when they publish the archive of the webcast.
The good news is the lead author of that paper you cite is on our team at the CMS Innovation Center, so we have some great minds on board to think through all of these issues!
Speaking of the Innovation Center, we just launched our new website and would love feedback on the Center’s goals: http://innovation.cms.gov
Donald Berwick is a change finder.
Using data to drive humane, ethical, sustainable care = spot on.
Future thinking, and implementing those “innovative” ideas, takes a ruthlessness that CMS does not have in its DNA.
There are a ton of areas that are ripe for jamming on from:
* managing my data online (or proxy’ing for my parents) and making better decisions via beautiful evidence to
* enrollment forms (for example the new doctor form is 45 page sign up sheet) to
* national patient unique IDs (that endure over time) to
* CDSS in my pocket (for all ages) to
….
Gathering ideas from United Statesians = good.
Ideas + $$ to make them real = better.
Ideas + $$ + political fortitude to push ideas into working, integrated CMS services = great.