Hospital’s struggle illustrates health IT woes
Filed under: Health data, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline
The University of California San Francisco Medical Center has written off more than a third of the $50 million it has spent on a system to digitize patients’ medical records, according to an article by AHCJ member Fred Schulte for the Huffington Post Investigative Fund and American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop.
The hospital started the project more than five years ago but after “persistent technical headaches,” it is has terminated the contractor and will start over on part of the project.
The costly setback pointedly illustrates the challenges health professionals face trying to meet a government mandate to bring American medicine into the computer age.
Doctors and technology analysts are less than enthusiastic about products now available. “Early reports from some American and European hospitals, they say, suggest that some technology may prove unreliable and could even pose safety problems for patients.”
While critics are concerned about patient safetly, U.S. manufacturers say no injuries or deaths can be attributed to software failure. However, as Schulte points out, “companies manufacturing health information technology systems are under no obligation to report injuries resulting from software malfunctions to the government.”
Schulte then cites a number of examples that point to failures or problems with software systems.
Related
Survey reveals how much patient privacy is at risk
Fred Schulte and Emma Schwartz of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund report on a survey in which 75 percent of health organization say patients’ medical records were put at “risk of improper disclosure.”
The study, done for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, also revealed that half of the people surveyed said they had “no plan in place to respond to security threats and many of them indicated that they are spending ‘little additional resources’ to combat the problem.”
While the federal stimulus package includes provisions to enhance the security and privacy of medical information, the survey found that many hospitals do not have and do not use tools to encrypt the data when it is stored or when it is sent over the Internet.
Schulte discussed the report on NPR’s Weekend Edition. The survey also was the subject of an iHealthBeat special report, featuring a health information technology officer, a representative of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, the HHS deputy director of health information privacy and a patient advocate.
The full report is available from ID Experts but does require free registration.
Case studies show how health IT fits in today
Filed under: Health care reform, Health data, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline
Writing for content, document and knowledge management publication KMWorld, David Raths evaluates applications of health information technology, or HIT, in a set of case studies which he wraps up into a handy overview of the utility and potential of HIT and electronic medical records. Raths breaks HIT up into specific applications because, he writes, the very thing that loads HIT with so much potential – the byzantine complexity and built-in inefficiency of the American health care system – also serves as its biggest obstacle.
“The sheer complexity of the healthcare setting is off-putting,” says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a principal at CMS Watch covering enterprise content management technologies. “Joining up the clinical and administrative, not to mention the insurance part, is a spectacular challenge.”
A hospital has many small departments and people don’t tend to think outside their department, he says. Deploying enterprise content management solutions is difficult when there are so many interlinking elements in the healthcare chain, and nobody really owns the overall process from beginning to end. “There is usually not one unifying solution,” Pelz-Sharpe says, “but lots of departmental solutions.”
A few of the solutions Raths explores:
- Systems to integrate the paper, which will inevitably be part of any system, with EMR systems. Other systems will help integrate existing paper archives with EMRs.
- Systems that speed up the decision-making process and collaboration between physicians while better recording exactly why decisions were made.
- Administrative-side systems used by hospitals to navigate through health care’s financial maze.
- Cloud-based systems that envision health IT as a service.
How will health reform affect Medicare?
Filed under: Government, Health care reform, Hot Health Headline
The Associated Press’ Carla Johnson looks at how health care reform might affect those currently covered by Medicare, focusing on five key areas: Medicare Advantage, prevention, hospitalization, electronic medical records and prescription drug coverage. Here are the basics:
- Medicare advantage is popular but relatively expensive. Some private insurers may leave the program if funding is cut, forcing some seniors to change providers. Cuts may also hit extras like hearing aids and health club memberships.
- Preventative services such as mammograms and diabetes classes will be better covered under most proposals.
- Some plans may punish hospitals with high readmission rates and encourage all hospitals to work to keep patients from coming back.
- Any move to electronic medical records and better coordination of care would benefit Medicare patients and providers, as Medicare suffers from many of the same inefficiencies as the system at large.
- As for the notorious prescription drug coverage “doughtnut hole,” the house democrats have proposed a plan that would fill it in by 2023.
Software glitch exposes VA patients to errors
As a result of software glitches, “Patients at VA health centers were given incorrect doses of drugs, had needed treatments delayed and may have been exposed to other medical errors,” the Associated Press reports.
The errors, involving faulty displays of electronic health records, were exposed after the AP received internal documents requested under the Freedom of Information act.
“The glitches, which began in August and lingered until last month, were not disclosed to patients by the VA even though they sometimes involved prolonged infusions for drugs such as blood-thinning heparin, which can be life-threatening in excessive doses.”
As the AP points out, such glitches are worrisome as the federal government is expected to strongly promote the use of electronic medical records.
While there is no evidence that any patients were harmed, there were nine reported cases in which patients received incorrect doses and nearly one-third of the VA’s medical centers reported seeing some kind of glitch.
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