CHICAGO – Health care executives voiced both frustration and caution last week about how fast and how far the federal government should act to help develop health performance data standards in the United States.
At a Chicago forum sponsored by the Joint Commission, a nonprofit organization that helps accredit and approve health care compliance standards, officials repeated a call for the federal government to help promote national standards for sharing health care performance data.
The JC last month called for the formation of a national performance measurement data strategy. In a white paper, the JC said only a national strategy under which data was shared across all sources could yield information on the true costs and effectiveness of specific health care services.
Dennis O’Leary, president emeritus of the JC, said the federal government had shown a “lack of willingness to help standardize the measurement framework.” Health and Human Services Department Secretary Mike Leavitt in particular, O'Leary said, seems wedded to the idea that performance data sharing works best on a local market level.
“No one is talking about building a grand database in the sky,” said O’Leary said. He added that he has had heated arguments with Leavitt on the matter. “But we have to be able to look at ourselves nationally on an issue-by-issue basis.”
Without a coordinated strategy, he said, potentially powerful registries would become data silos. “Soon we’ll have a lot of data but no way to link that information.” It would be useful, he said, to be able to loop such registries together so that cardiac surgeons across the country could compare data on similar procedures, for example.
Others agreed on the importance of a national view of health data. “How difficult would it be to have a national register of medical devices?” asked Tom Williams, executive director at the Integrated Health Care Association. “If we can bar code cereal we can bar code the technology.”
But not everybody here wants the federal government too far in their tent. Francois de Brantes, chief executive officer at the Bridges to Excellence organization, said working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for example, would involve working under CMS rules.
“We may have something that’s usable in a CMS setting,” he said of BTE, a project to encourage hospitals to align their financial incentives with proven outcomes. “But once it’s engrained in law you can’t change it. So far, we’ve stayed away.”
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
