Health IT could save lives, billions of dollars Improving access to patient records said key to reformBy Ed Sealover, Rocky Mountain News Published 十二月 15, 2008 at 9:43 p.m. Text size
Photo by Dennis Schroeder / The Rocky
Dr. Jenny Bajaj, left, goes over lab results on a computer with patient Ann Lackey recently at Kaiser Permanente's East Denver Campus. Having all patient records available electronically could save thousands of lives and billions of dollars annually, experts say.
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Dr. John Merenich was scheduled for a routine visit with a patient in her 40s recently when he got an alert from his computer system that she was overdue for a mammogram.
The woman got the checkup and discovered she had a cancerous lump. Eventually, the disease went into remission - but only because the computerized reminder helped to catch the problem so early, Merenich said.
Merenich, a Denver physician with Kaiser Permanente, cites this example when he says one of the biggest keys to reforming the nation's troubled health care system is computerized access to patients' records.
Health information technology is one of the hottest discussion points in the debate over how to improve America's and Colorado's health care systems. Medical organizations have been studying it, private groups have been experimenting with it and experts say it could help to save some $400 billion - and 98,000 lives - a year in the U.S.
"If we don't have health IT, we will not have reform," Tom Daschle, U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services nominee, said recently in Denver.
Health IT refers to the idea of medical professionals putting their patient records onto computers and building a secure information highway so any physician anywhere could access the system. The benefits could be nothing short of phenomenal, backers say.
Because just 4 percent of doctors have connectable electronic medical records, most patients are walking into a world of unfamiliarity and risk if they end up in a hospital without their physician in charge of their care. Allergy, medication and health history records would not be immediately available, especially if the visit comes after hours.
Studies have suggested that $400 billion is spent annually on unnecessary duplicate lab testing, said Donna Lynne, Kaiser Permanente regional president for Colorado and chairwoman of the board for the Colorado Regional Health Information Organization.
In addition, some 98,000 people die every year because of medical errors that can be caused by prescribing drugs that interact fatally with someone's allergies or other prescriptions, she said.
But the roadblocks to implementing such a plan are enormous. Estimates pin the cost of computerizing records as high as $100,000 per doctor.
While the federal government has encouraged online records, it has offered little incentive to do so, said Steven Summer, president of the Colorado Hospital Association.
No fewer than eight offices or boards within the federal government are studying health IT. Minnesota has passed a law requiring the creation of a statewide system by 2015, and several groups in Colorado are working to create such a system here.
Kaiser, Denver Health Medical Center, Children's Hospital and University of Colorado Hospital got a $5 million federal grant to connect their systems. It took four years to implement and went live just two weeks ago, Lynne said.
The Colorado Hospital Association teamed with the Colorado Behavioral Healthcare Council to use $14.4 million in grants to build a network connecting 388 hospitals, clinics and community mental health centers. The Colorado Telehealth Network should be fully operational by mid-2010, Summer said.
State Sen. Bob Hagedorn, D-Arvada, said there was a lot of hope earlier this year that health IT would garner attention in 2009. After the Wall Street collapse dried up state revenues, however, many advocates say it could be years before anything serious is done.
If so, that would be a mistake, Hagedorn said.
"The frustrating thing is that you can look over this little mountain and see a promised land where you can reap huge benefits and huge savings and huge improvements in the quality of health care," he said. "But that mountain you have to scale is Mount Everest." |
发表于 2008-12-17 19:41:14
