By: Althea Blackwell, DC Government Technology Examiner
The health care reform legislation being discussed by Congress is designed to control costs, improve care and expand health insurance coverage to most of the 46 million uninsured Americans. The health care debate may continue past the August deadline but once the plan is passed the uninsured and the insured Americans will discover the ongoing transformation of American health care through health information technology and the various health tools in place today and others being developed.
Health Information Technology (IT) allows a one stop place for the management of medical information and a secure exchange between health care consumers and providers. There are numerous benefits to health IT but some are to prevent medical errors, reduce health care cost and decrease paperwork. And because of the health network, the public will benefit from early detection of infectious disease outbreaks around the country and tracking of chronic disease management.
The health information technologies tools used are in place to manage health information, help consumers gather all of their health information in one place and the ability to share it securely with other health care providers. Some tools exist now and some are being developed for health IT with the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) program or the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). Additional tools used will come from individual stakeholders such as providers, patients, hospital, pharmacists and others in the industry.
The NHIN was developed by the U.S. Government and the Office of The National Coordinator ONC to provide a secure, nationwide, interoperable health information infrastructure between Consumers, Insurance Companies, Hospital and Clinical Groups, Electronic Medical Record (EMR), Healthcare System, Third Party Vendors, State and Federal Government Agencies, Pharmaceutical, Medical Device and Research Organizations.
The EMR tool is a real-time patient health record to aid clinicians in decision making. Some obvious benefits of an EMR are automation and streamline the workflow of medical records; clinical information is communicated clearly and prevents delays in care. Now the issues are implementation of EMR, obtaining buy in from all stakeholders, legal issues with data sharing, privacy of shared records over insecure network lines and patients access to changing their own data.
Another interesting health IT tool is e-prescribing (electronic prescribing). Along with the EMR allows a prescription to be electronically transmitted to a prescriber, dispenser and pharmacy or health plan. The Institute of Medicine (1999) noted that each year seven thousand people die, and 1.5 million are injured from preventable medication errors. The Institute recommended by 2010 all prescribers should write and all pharmacies should be able to receive prescriptions electronically.
Telehealth another health IT tool uses telecommunications technologies to deliver health-related services and patient care. Today there are more than 200 telehealth networks connecting 2,000 institutions across the country. Some benefits live videoconferencing to connect two or more health care facilities to patients, physicians to consult in real time, digital images that can be transmitted, home-based monitoring devices for patients and transmit clinical data over the internet and e-visits or by email or phone and offered by health insurers through a secure Web portal.
Polls have shown that just over half of Americans think the health-care system is in need of reform. And the discussion points in the reform are largely over how to pay for the health care overhaul. Once passed the bill will create a new public health plan to compete with private insurers and extend health insurance to million and million of Americans now without coverage. And with health information technology, the quality of Americans healthcare will improve.
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Tags: Electronic Medical Record, Electronic Prescribing, EMR, Federal Health Architecture, Health Information Technology, Healthcare System
Posted August 4, 2009 by admin under EMR, Electronic Prescription
