Improving patient care and reducing overall healthcare costs through smart technology systems is a key priority of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Allocated economic recovery funding includes $19 billion for grants and incentives that utilize health IT in order to save lives by reducing waste and decreasing medical errors.
One of the few trends in health care technology that promises to actually reduce costs while improving patient care is the move toward seamless networking of electronic patient records. The ultimate goal is to move all working records, from detailed test results to clinical history files for every individual, to electronic database form, and to make such records shareable between healthcare professionals on an as-needed basis. Likely, this will include wearable personal monitoring devices, such as for EKG and blood pressure, wirelessly linked into the database.
Development of this trend is proceeding as a number of parallel threads we expect to eventually converge. One of those threads is seamless sharing of medical records between institutions.
On Friday (3/20/09), a collaborative effort involving computer-system developer IBM, healthcare information technology developer MedVirginia, and the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) announced a first-of-a-kind electronic records exchange system to help speed the process of granting disability benefits for millions of Americans. Through the use of new software and services, the SSA claims to have shaved time needed to evaluate disability benefits from months to minutes.
The project, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) Cooperative, represents the first health information exchange between a regional health information organization and a U.S. federal agency. The new system, which uses IBM's Health Information Provider (HSP) solution, is said to not only reduce processing times, but improve claims accuracy and reduce costs.
Spokespersons for the project explain that SSA uses individual medical records to determine almost 3 million disability claims each year. To make those decisions, the agency relies on doctors, hospitals, and other health professionals to provide medical information about patients. Through the migration from paper to electronic transmissions based on the patient's authorization, the agency is able to significantly reduce the time spent waiting for medical records and improve the service for those it serves. NHIN's goal is to enable secure access to such healthcare data and real time information sharing and exchange of healthcare data among physicians, patients, hospitals, laboratories and pharmacies, and other stakeholders, regardless of the location or application.
Providing such information-sharing infrastructure is, of course, key to achieving the ultimate goal of seamless integration of the healthcare IT system.
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