Critics of the health information technology community’s approach to developing a national network seem to be getting louder lately. Generally, they fall into two camps. The first group believes technology developers have overlooked health care consumers — patients, nurses and physicians — in their eagerness to market new applications. The second group believes policy-makers have created such a complex framework for connecting health IT systems that little is being accomplished.
Here are some recent refrains:
A report by the California HealthCare Foundation, based on a survey of noted health care leaders, concludes that the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) initiative represents a worthy goal but is impractical and cannot be implemented.
Doctors affiliated with the American Academy of Family Physicians told the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics that primary care physicians are being left out of the development of health IT standards.
A group of notable physicians and health IT industry executives has formed a company — Champions in Healthcare — to advocate for the involvement of physicians, nurses and other clinicians in the design of health IT systems.
What are we to make of such criticisms? Should the national health IT plan be simplified? Has the industry oversold the technology? Or has it focused on the wrong customer — hospital chief information officers rather than clinical end users?
In a word, yes.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has taken on a daunting set of challenges, including NHIN, health IT standards and biosurveillance. Perhaps it is trying to do too much at once and would be more successful if it focused on one challenge at a time. A good place to start might be making lab results and drug information available to physicians when they need it.
As for the health IT industry overlooking end users, that issue will sort itself out slowly. Health IT must first be developed for and sold to individual consumers, physicians and patients, not just IT managers. With adoption hovering around 5 percent, the industry overlooks end users at its own risk.
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.
