By Hootsbuddy
A previous post looked at a few of the many details involved in updating and standardizing health care to keep up with technology. As consumers we don't really want to know a lot of details, but we have high expectations of experts. When we feel bad, we want the doctor to make us better. And in recent years, if there is a ticking bomb in our body (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, whatever) we don't want to think about it but at some level we really want to find out.
The day is past when the family doctor was our sole medical care expert. Today, if we are lucky, we have a Primary Care Physician (PCP) who is our main resource, but he or she is likely to interact (again, if we are lucky) with any number more specialized doctors, labs and clinics. Confusion in this multi-faceted system is so commonplace I don't have to think of an illustration. The reader knows what I mean from personal experience.
Tomorrow's medicine is already here. And as I pointed out in the earlier post improvements in medical care are already under way. Health 2.0 may blossom for our grandchildren, but until then the bigger challenge is taking care of a couple of generations not that technically adroit. Between then and now, here is another look at a specialized part of today's health care reform already under way.
CCHIT is the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology. Their mission is to coordinate a national standard by which HIT (health information technology) can be used most effectively. Just as many wrinkles had to be ironed out (and continue to be) with the growth and development of the Internet, a mixture of already-in-use systems that are not inter-operable must be standardized for maximum use.
In this twenty-five minute video Matthew Holt interviews Mark Leavitt, Chairman of CCHIT, now a 501-c-3 organization, discussing a few of the many challenges they face. I find Holt's rapid-fire UK accent not easy to catch but Leavitt makes up for what I miss by his clear, easy to understand responses.
About halfway through I heard something that jumped out at me. They were discussing the efficacy of using performance incentives (an important part of the reform package being stiffly opposed by... forget it... if I go there I'll get on a tangent...) to improve patient care. Holt posed the question whether new technology might be an obstacle to better care. Leavitt's response should be over the door of every clinic and hospital.
Seems like I mentioned that before.
Mark Leavitt, Chair, CCHIT from Health 2.0 on Vimeo.
Toward the end of the interview it is pointed out that the US is still behind a number of other countries in this technology. Some smaller countries were mentioned as examples, but if the US is to retain its place as the world's leader in better medicine the mission of CCHIT is not optional. Leavitt cautiously predicts that about fifty percent of the system will be in compliance by 2014.
That's about the time that Obama says real changes should start to appear, making a difference in both outcomes and costs.
By implementing an electronic medical record (EMR) in 2006, it could be said that our medical group was ahead of the curve. However, to some degree I am regretting jumping in so early. We have inter-operability, but nowhere near what I would like to see down the road and certainly nowhere near what we need to make a dent in the healthcare "fragmentation" problem. We need a lot more industry-wide standards before we get the ideal system.
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