“We don’t have to thumb through a paper chart to find things,” says Virginia Mason’s Bender.
About 12% of doctors currently use electronic medical records, estimates the Congressional Budget Office. Another 7.6% have a basic system in at least one area of the hospital.
ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS TRAINING IN SEATTLE FULL
Nationwide, only 1.5% of hospitals have a full electronic medical records system, according to a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine. “All of this attention on IT is terrific but it needs to be coupled with reform of the economics of health care,” he says.Įven with its limitations, Seattle – with systems in place in several of its major hospitals – is way ahead of many areas. Without changing the way insurers pay for care, “you won’t drive costs down.” “As long as you will pay every time I do that test, the incentive is to do that test as many times as I can,” says Stephen Lieber, CEO of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, a nonprofit group whose members include technology companies. Still, bigger savings require more fundamental changes, such as removing financial incentives to do duplicative tests and provide unnecessary care. Computers alone won’t slow rising health costs.Īdvocates say that information technology can save money by making health systems more efficient. Especially in smaller facilities with smaller staffs, “we need to make sure we’re giving them time to do this properly, he says.”ģ. Such systems, he says, have many benefits, but they “also have a risk for side effects.” Good programs help doctors quickly and easily distinguish between drugs with similar names, flagging differences between two similar drugs by capitalizing letters that differ in the names, for example.īut testing the systems and training the staff takes time-which raises concerns about the 2011 deadline for the first batch of stimulus money, says Payne.
Thomas Payne, medical director for information technology at the University of Washington, says his organization is now working on installing computer order entry for prescriptions. “If you don’t do it right, physician orders can show up in the wrong place, be confusing or come at the wrong time,” he says. If hospitals rush into installing such systems, “it will kill people,” says Wood. Swedish Medical Center’s Wood warns there are risks in moving too quickly–especially in installing systems that allow physicians to enter medication or treatment orders electronically. Instead, she says, regulators should provide incentives for providers “to use existing systems” and then improve technology so those systems can easily share data. Newell, the Swedish information chief, warns that money could be wasted if stimulus dollars are spent by doctors and hospitals on a hodge-podge of electronic medical record systems. That, he says, will allow Swedish and the other hospitals to eventually “talk to each other.” One of the largest makers of electronic medical records has created a way for its systems to communicate with rival products, says Tom Wood, the physician who oversees health-information technology at Swedish. Virginia Mason staff, for example, can view the electronic records of patients served by Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, a large HMO, but “it’s not a true data exchange,” says Bender.Ĭhange is coming. To work around compatibility problems, hospitals have figured out ways for their staffs to see some of each other’s information. Manufacturers have been slow to create systems that work together because they have wanted to emphasize their uniqueness to gain market share, Bender says. But it can’t share data with either Virginia Mason or the University of Washington, which is the third big hospital here. Swedish spent four years and $120 million rolling out an electronic medical record system, which now links all three of its hospitals, along with the majority of its 40 clinics. That’s one of the lessons of Seattle’s experience, here are more:
Unless the money is doled out carefully, the money “may go down a rathole,” says Janice Newell, chief information officer for Swedish Medical Center, another major hospital here. Most of the money will go to doctors and hospitals.īut there are risks. Under the federal-stimulus legislation, the government plans to spend $32 billion on health-information technology over the next 10 years, and projects $13 billion in savings by doing so. Overcoming the obstacles, Bender says, “will take federal will and money.” Part Two: Electronic Prescribing Increasing Despite GlitchesĪmong the reasons: cost, computer systems that aren’t compatible with rival systems, resistance among physicians and privacy concerns. Part One: Doctors Say Electronic Data-Sharing Is Saving Lives, Money
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