Health IT represents best chance for true health system reform - July 5, 2010
Orlando Florida
June 28, 2010 — 11:47am ET | By Neil Versel
Why do we need "meaningful use"? Why do we need further reform of our healthcare system, not just the charade of insurance reform masking some actual elements of care improvement that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act gave us?
The Commonwealth Fund answered those questions last week when it released its latest report on health system performance. "Compared with six other nations--Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom--the U.S. healthcare system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives," reads the report overview.
I can't take seriously the claims by some pundits and politicians that the United States has "the best healthcare in the world," because it's clear that we don't. Even though many consumers equate more care with better care, those of us that work in or closely follow the healthcare industry know better. It's an inefficient system that rewards volume over quality and doctors' ability to remember things on the spot rather than consult tools like clinical decision support.
"With enactment of the Affordable Care Act, however, we have entered a new era in American healthcare," says Karen Davis, Commonwealth Fund president and the study's lead author. "We will begin strengthening primary care and investing in health information technology and quality improvement, ensuring that all Americans can obtain access to high quality, efficient healthcare."
Maybe. The Affordable Care Act does focus on primary care and, by expanding the pool of insured Americans, does address the problems of access and equity. But the reasons to invest in IT came earlier.
There's the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the law that coined the phrase "meaningful use." Going back to 1996, we have the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. HIPAA, of course, was supposed to streamline administrative functions by standardizing transactions. But regulations that allowed each payer to have its own addenda to code sets have largely defeated that intention.
The upcoming transition to ANSI X12 5010 coding from the current version 4010A1 promises to remedy this problem, but we'll see. Let's just not delude ourselves into thinking that the Affordable Care Act is going to fix American healthcare. Your work in moving to EMRs, clinical decision support, quality reporting and standardized coding will do far more than simply adding millions of people to the insurance pool and throwing around a few bucks for primary care. You in health IT are the real faces of U.S. health reform. - Neil
Read more: Health IT represents the best chance for true health system reform - FierceHealthIT http://www.fiercehealthit.com/story/health-it-represents-best-chance-true-health-system-reform/2010-06-28#ixzz0sohidtvU
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