WASHINGTON – Interest in healthcare IT adoption has surged forward recently, but the industry needs to stay focused on interoperability, cautioned experts at the World Health Care Congress.
Infrastructure is not what most people think of when it comes to healthcare IT, yet ultimately it is the most fundamental need if care is going to be improved, said William Winkenwerder, MD, senior adviser for Deloitte Consulting LLP and the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, who spoke at the April 16 event.
The federal government has its eye on interoperability to contain costs. Kelly Cronin, program director at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, said interoperability would be the driver for payment reform.
If the United States is to pay for healthcare differently, it will require sharing information across care settings and getting away from volume-based care. To begin with, the federal government will use incentives and rewards to compel providers to share data, but over time, penalties will be mandated, she predicted.
George Halvorson knows about connectivity. As chairman and CEO of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals he has seen Kaiser work effectively as a microcosm of the whole U.S. healthcare system, linking caregivers to an integrated structure.
“When you have all the pieces in place, the outcome is spectacular,” he said. His advice? America needs a “plug and play” infrastructure to move connectivity forward.
David Cerino, general manager of the Health Solutions Group at Microsoft Health thinks about connectivity from the consumer and patient point of view. “Sometimes in the healthcare industry we are a little too deep in the details,” he said.
Cerino has worked in the financial industry and the online travel industry helping the public to transition from paper to electronic methods. Recently, Microsoft recruited him to do the same thing for health records. “The competition is paper,” Cerino said. “It’s important as an industry that we understand this.”
Cerino said starting small and building trust is the only way. He recommended trying something simple first, like e-appointments across all systems.
David Merritt, project director at the Center for Health Transformation praised the progress so far. “We’re at the cusp of really being able to tackle some of the problems we’ve talked about for a really long time,” he said.
