Since this is National Health IT Week, we’d like to celebrate the role of health IT in healthcare delivery and recognize all who work in the field, whether at the institutional or vendor level. Health IT has played a major role in the transformation of healthcare delivery, from the introduction of the electronic medical record (EMR) under the Obama administration, to today, when it allows organizations to view data and generate actionable reports to improve outcomes and efficiency.
I spoke with Nora Lissy, Dimensional Insight’s director of healthcare information, and Julie Lamoureux, senior healthcare consultant. With years of experience in healthcare industry in different capacities such as nurse and statistician, they share their insights about the role of health IT in improving healthcare delivery and outcomes.
Biggest challenges in healthcare and how IT can solve them
There are many unique challenges in healthcare today. Certain challenges cause more friction than others, whether it is the Affordable Care Act at the institutional level or reducing costs at the organizational level. Some of the existing challenges that cause the most friction include the enormous amount of different technological systems – whether analytical, decision support, EMR, to name a few – and the compatibility of such systems.
Regulatory requirements are also a big challenge in healthcare, as they are becoming more burdensome to organizations and practitioners. Both governmental payors and private insurers want to bring costs under control. To do this, they are increasingly turning to more value-based and bundle reimbursements. The value-based payment models are accompanied by a higher financial risk for healthcare organizations. By supporting the evaluation of practice related to those bundle and value-based payments, health IT can provide guidance and identify performance issues to improve and alleviate the financial risk.
Furthermore, hospitals lack standard definitions for widely accepted outcomes and process measures. Health IT can help resolve this challenge by creating and implementing a standard set of definitions, rules, and measures to analyze organizational outcomes. Overall, challenges with the most friction originate from complexity and a lack of both consistency and standardization, which health IT can support and solve.
How health IT can support population and public health
Population and public health are becoming more important in healthcare today. Organizations from all levels of care can collaborate with health IT technology with the goal of unifying treatments for better outcomes.
Julie says, “Population health is no longer just concerned with a curative approach. To better support population and public health, health IT needs to integrate preventive, curative, and effective transitions of care as well as community data.” She also describes that there are numerous IT tools in the market, consumer health IT apps, clinical decision support, EMRs, that aim at prevention and coordination of care. However, there are other processes in which health IT can also support organization needs, such as data governance and physician performance measurement. Therefore, healthcare organizations from all levels of care need health IT to unify treatments and improve population health and patient outcomes.
Technological innovations in healthcare IT
What does the future hold for health IT? One technological innovation is natural language processing to gather information or unstructured data such as practitioner notes and documentation. There are still other new innovative and emerging technologies that will impact health IT.
Nora shares her insight about the future of EMRs. “EMRs and EHRs have been about ‘capturing’ the data electronically. The EMR now is more of a database that needs another layer added to allow data to be analyzed, which is where I think EMRs are evolving now.”
She also discusses the emerging importance of machine learning to help improve healthcare outcomes. “Health IT has nailed the ability to capture data, report on it retrospectively, and give healthcare organizations and providers the ability to see into their data and work on improving them based on historical data. We now need a type of AI machine learning that can help guide organizations as to why certain outcomes happened and to identify risk for harm before it happens. The “machine” would have the capability to identify trends and patterns within the data that may not be so clear and connected to the trained clinician. It will not be a replacement but another tool in the clinician’s toolbox.”
What’s next for health IT and healthcare?
National Health IT Week allows us to reflect on the impact of health IT on healthcare delivery. Without health IT, organizations would not be able to capture data electronically – we would still be operating with paper and pen. Health IT will continue to play a role in the industry by helping organizations analyze data and improve outcomes. Health IT tools can also improve organizational efforts through a diverse workforce since there is still a need for clinical, operational, financial, and programming knowledge. As challenges in healthcare continue to emerge, technology can support those in the industry and tackle those issues.
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