Dive Brief:
- EHRs have proven to be helpful tools in coordinating primary patient care, but lack of interoperability and care plans still make them incomplete tools that challenge medical staff almost as much as they help them, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Informatics Management Association.
- The study demonstrated that EHRs can be helpful in streamlining communication and task delegation, as well as helping offload work from physicians through the creation of templates for symptom-specific data collection by nurses and medical assistants. However, a lack of interoperability and inadequate tracking of patient care over time, among other issues, still undermine their value.
- "EHR vendors in the United States need to work alongside practicing primary care teams to create more clinically useful EHRs that support dynamic care plans, integrated care management software, more functional and interoperable practice registries, and greater ease of data tracking over time," the study concluded.
Dive Insight:
The more EHRs are studied, the more the same issues keep popping up. For example, the American College of Physicians came to practically identical conclusions to this research in its study of EHRs.
ONC is doing its best to speed up the momentum for change. Director Dr. Karen DeSalvo is increasing the pressure on interoperability via a February conference dedicated to Interoperable Health IT for a Healthy Nation beginning today in Washington, D.C. The Annual Meeting will deliver two days of in-depth content on the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, released Friday.
The ONC also just appointed its first chief information officer, Dr. Michael James McCoy, who is a renowned advocate and expert on interoperability, so we don't think there is any shortage of focus on the issue.
Unfortunately, talk is cheap. The new 10-year IT plan calls for a lot of lofty goals—including more incentives in both the public and private sectors for interoperability—but Federal Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo made clear that the roadmap is not a bid by the agency to become a regulator. In fact, one section of the report is under a heading that incudes the expression "non-governmental governance."
"We are not specifically calling for a new entity for nationwide governance," DeSalvo said, but "we still want to give guidance and a timeline" for meeting interoperability objectives.
That pronouncement takes a little bit of the steam out of this release. Failing any real authority, this leaves the roadmap as soft around the edges as Medicare's sweeping pronouncement about payment reform earlier this week.
