Archive for June, 2009
Advocate exec: Doctors in smaller practices need infrastructural, administrative help and access to latest technology,
June 8th, 2009 | 
Author: I know full well that my Costa Mesa Chiropractic is so buried in paperwork that I have very little time to keep up with the latest technologies.
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When Dr. Lee Sacks was in a private practice with two other family physicians, he said, they were so busy with time-consuming insurance paperwork that it was difficult to keep up with trends in patient care.
Most Americans receive their care from practices of fewer than five doctors.
As the top administrative physician at the largest provider of medical care in Chicago, Sacks is lending resources to the more than 3,200 independent doctors, largely in small practices, affiliated with Advocate Health Care in hopes of improving quality of care.
If doctors in small practices don’t get funds and support to equip their offices with the latest technology and quality data, Sacks said, there will be little hope for President Barack Obama and Congress to effectively implement health-care reform that is high-quality and cost-effective.
“Unless you create an organization among all of these small practices, there is going to be a great disconnect because a lot of the [health-care reform] plans are predicated on organized groups,” said Sacks, executive vice president and chief medical officer at Advocate, which operates nine Chicago-area hospitals.
“Some of that is coaching and training, and some of that is infrastructure, data and feedback.”
Advocate says its efforts to help individual doctors and those in smaller practices are paying off. Over the past two years, Sacks said, smaller practices that once scored in the 60th or 70th percentile on measurements of quality are routinely in the 90th percentile, much like large practices.
Ways to improve quality of care and patient outcomes can be as simple as paying for doctors and their staff to attend a daylong workshop or providing physicians with e-prescribing technology, which reduces errors. These are among Advocate’s efforts to improve patient care, which Sacks thinks could work more broadly across the country.
Under the stimulus package approved by Congress and signed by Obama in February, doctors will receive more than $40,000 from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services over a five-year period beginning in 2011 for the electronic conversion of medical records.
“Physicians are faced with an unprecedented offer from the federal government to essentially pay them to automate their practices and provide better care for patients with electronic records,” said Glen Tullman, chief executive of Allscripts Misys Healthcare Solutions Inc[.], the nation’s largest publicly traded electronic health record firm. “Advocate is offering them a relatively easy first step that’s both a simple solution to a key public safety issue and an on-ramp to the complete electronic health record.”
Sacks expects hospitals to be called on to reduce costs, improve patient outcomes and reduce errors.
“We know we have to do more with less,” he said. “I can’t imagine that additional money is going to be enough to offset the additional coverage.”
Privacy a Stumbling Block in Healthcare IT – InternetNews.com
As a Colorado Spring chiropractor I am very familiar with the issue of patient privacy. This is a summary of a news story out today.
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WASHINGTON — The push for universal electronic health records, a long-simmering issue in the healthcare debate, is gaining fresh momentum with the new administration and Congress, but privacy concerns continue to confound policymakers.
President Obama has set a goal of digitizing every American’s health record by 2014, and he included $19 billion to that end in the economic stimulus package.
But the question remains, how do health IT providers ensure that patients remain in control of their most sensitive personal data in a digital healthcare regime?
At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference today, a panel of experts took up that question, acknowledging that it doesn’t really have an answer at this point.
“This is one of those issues that has been going round and round and round for years,” said Joel Slackman, managing director at the BlueCross BlueShield Association.
But in the case of the stimulus money, that debate is going to be cut short.
“The time in which things have to be done is incredibly compressed,” Slackman said.
The IT provisions in the stimulus bill amended the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, broadening its scope to cover tech firms offering personal health portals.
“I don’t know if we’ve gotten there yet,” Torres said.
The advent of the Web-based personal healthcare portal was greeted with significant privacy concerns.
“At Microsoft we decided very early on with our HealthVault product that consumers should control what goes in, who sees it going out,” Torres said.
Torres said that patients can control the information that is entered into their files, as well as which doctor gets to see it.
The appropriate granularity of these controls is one of the thorniest issues facing policy-makers as they set privacy rules for e-health records.
“Consent is the 800-pound gorilla for medical privacy,” said Ashley Katz, executive director of the advocacy group Patient Privacy Rights.
The prospect of bringing IT firms into the business of managing medical records can also introduce a significant challenge in ensuring compliance with a bewildering complex of state laws.
“You don’t even know that a law’s conflicting until it smacks you in the face, sometimes,” Slackman said.
Posted in patient advocacy | 
Tags: patient advocacy, patient privacy, patient rights | 
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