Diana Manos, Senior Editor
Diana Manos is Senior Editor for Healthcare IT News. Located in Washington, D.C., she covers policy and legislation issues surrounding healthcare IT. Follow Diana on Twitter @DManos_IT_News.
Mostashari: Technology is not enough
WASHINGTON | October 17, 2012
The U.S. is making strong and fast headway on the adoption of electronic health records, but technology is not enough on its own to reform the nation’s healthcare, said National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Farzad Mostashari at a recent event in Washington, D.C.
At a briefing hosted by the Alliance for Health Reform, Mostashari said healthcare IT is crucial, but it’s not only about technology. “It’s how we use the technology and how we accomplish the goals we set for ourselves.” The goals are threefold, he said: driving better care, encouraging better health and lowering healthcare costs.
“Technology is the enabler; the foundation,” said Mostashari. “Patients need to care for themselves and become partners in their care.”
“There’s a lot of work still to be done, but the curve is sloping upward; we’re on the steep part of the curve right now," he added.
“We’ve set the adoption in place and clearly that is moving,” said Mostashari. “Meaningful use Stage 1 got people on the escalator, but that’s not enough. We need to keep constantly moving up.”
[See also: Mostashari predicts great heights for MU in 2012.]
Mostashari lauded both the Bush and the Obama Administrations for backing healthcare IT advancement with their leadership and funding requests.
And he praised Congress’s wisdom in writing the HITECH Act: “They started with the end in mind, then worked backwards.”
The regional extension centers (RECs) established by HITECH have been key to the success in adoption so far, Mostashari said. Some 147,2008 physicians are currently being helped by the RECs, including 70 percent of all rural primary care providers. “We couldn’t have dreamed this possible three years ago."
Meaningful use should be considered a building block that continues to build, he said. The ultimate goal is to be able to manage the health of populations. “It’s not the whole story, but it’s the beginning of the story. If you can’t manage information you can’t really manage care in a modern healthcare system.”
[See also: Mostashari rankled over HIT survey conclusions.]
“We’re on really a great path,” Mostashari said. “There’s a lot of hard work to be done, still, but we can do it. The future of medicine is going to be brighter than its past.”
MedQuack say: Digital Literacy and Humanism
You forgot the humanism. Maybe I'm in a unique spot here having written an EMR years ago and knowing how to code, but everyone leaves that out! Having spent hours and hours with MDs creating a system for "their" use, not mine gave me some tremendous insight and yes we had some go arounds but we came out winners and we didn't put every decision and discussion down to an algorithm.
I know the ONC office has to be the cheerleader here and I respect that but we have a ton of Algo Duping going on out there with information coming in outside of the medical records that is making some impact, and a lot of it is flawed when it gets queried with credible data, such as in the EMR/EHR.
We have more consumer apps than one can shake a stick at with few using it as too many apps only do one thing. Yes it's going to take an effort to get some smart folks tech wise in key positions. Congress is one with their digital illiterate letter wanting to halt the stimulus incentives and yes they are dumber than rocks, why? They don't participate themselves as patients so they don't get it:) They are Algo duped and have not a clue and do stand in the way as you also need logic with all of this.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2012/10/digital-illiterate-algo-duped-gop...
Patient involvement is great and needed but not to the point to where some almost attack their doctors who have been spending hours trying to get the patient's claim paid, patients don't see this and it's ugly, I have. It's a game to a degree and sad one where nobody wins on some angles of it.
Humanism needs to be there by all means and again the flawed data thats coming in to play is scary with folks writing matches on some data that should not be. You wonder how the world looks at the US...may not be too hot out there as the Nobel committe just grabbed an algorithm/query that was your average basic matching query that thousands of developers write every day and gave it an award. The same stuff that dating sites use, so why didn't Match.com get an award for this . It's about how much sense it made as if humanism were considered, groups and people like the Clinton foundation would have been in there, not this algorithm. It was a good match but again thousands of developers write the same matching queries day in and day out. I did when I wrote, tons of SQL statements, so think about this..how does the world look at the US...oh just drag out one of their algorithms and give them an award as they don't seem to be very impressed with humanism...I think there's a little bit of that out there and we see it every day in the US with what is happening today.
Sure I like technology and what it can do to enhance and make us smarter but I also don't like it when it runs away with consumers and Algo duping comes in to actually hurt decision making processes by creating more insecurity. Even outside of healthcare, some folks think they need a flow sheet to date.....they have been conditioned by Algo duping. In my travels I have quite a few folks now comment on the fact that we don't trust all the information anymore and it pays to ask questions as the flawed data grows out there with a lot of the predictive analytics in use.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2012/10/nobel-prize-for-residency-match-s...