Interoperability – Essential for EHR Societal Benefits

“Interoperability is one of the fundamental constituents required to derive societal benefits from Healthcare IT”

Interoperability is a major outcome that healthcare professionals are expecting from every healthcare IT product. What does interoperability mean?  We can state interoperability as a connected healthcare system. It connects healthcare system in a way to make real-time patient data available to every medical practice anywhere. For instance, if Mrs. Johnson moves from Florida to California, her new provider does not need to worry about whether she is allergic to antibiotics and what is her medication history. He does not need to carry out her laboratory tests again. All the information will be available to him online via EHR to EHR link. This is interoperability, and this is what we want to achieve in long-run via different healthcare IT products.

Janice Walker, a healthcare IT researcher, along with her colleagues wrote a paper “The Value of Health Care Information Exchange and Interoperability”. In the paper, she has discussed how interoperability can transform the health industry and produce impressive societal benefits. According to her, seventy-seven billion dollars can be saved from healthcare information exchange and interoperability.  Some of the benefits of interoperability she discussed are:

• With interoperable healthcare system, providers always have instant access to required information at the point of care
• It gives convenience and choice to patients to visit any medical practice or provider
• It gives better and valid data for medical research
• It reduces medical errors, improves patient care, and reduces costs

Electronic Health Records have various features that aid interoperability. EHR features such as e-prescription, redundant test reminders, lab connectivity and drug interaction checks, etc. have contributed significantly in creating interoperable healthcare system. There is still much to do for healthcare IT companies in order to have a complete interoperable system for realizing societal benefits of healthcare IT.

Fig. Interoperability – Essential for EHR Societal Benefits

Medical ID Theft: Danger for patients & physicians for all time

According to a recent study by Pamela Lewis Dolan, medical identify theft has become the fastest growing type of identity theft in the world. Medical identity theft became common on the radar of the Medicare, an investigative concern for many other agencies. The study also pointed out that each year approximately 2 million people become victim of identity theft with more than 5,300 health professionals have listed themselves in a federal database that tracks medical identity theft. In recent years, it has become the fastest-growing type of identity theft in the world, according to reports.

According to study Medical ID theft is categorized into two types:

1. The kind that involves a patient's identity being compromised
2. The kind that involves the physician's professional identifiers being stolen.

Both medical ID types could bring professional or financial harm to healthcare professionals. According to a study physicians could be suffering from offences of the Health Insurance Mobility and Responsibility Act if they did not effectively secure the information from being stolen. “Many people don’t know what medical ID theft is, so educating patients on the problems and how to detect it is well worth a physician’s time and the biggest key to detection is education.”, said Shantanu Agrawal, Medical Director for the Center for Program Integrity at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

“The key is for health care organizations to have their own anti-fraud procedures and to be vigilant about using them.” said Ponemon. He further elaborated that if you lose your credit card, for example, you can call the bank and they will cancel your current card within seconds and send you a new card with a new number. Use of medical identification isn’t as simple to stop.

Fig. Medical ID Theft

Meaningful Use of EHR

Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a comprehensive and computerized healthcare record management system. The main objective of Electronic Health Record (EHR) software is to electronically collect health information, as all information is recorded digitally. Electronic Health Record (EHR) include various types of information such as demographics of a particular area, medical history of patients, lab test results, patients statistics like weight, age, medical record, insurance details etc.

The Medicare and Medicaid EHR provide incentive payments to professionals to implement, upgrade and demonstrate meaningful use of certified EHR technology. Meaningful Use is the term to describe the specific set of benchmarks that an eligible provider or hospital needs to meet to be able to qualify for the incentive program. Meaningful Use is a multi-year, staged approach that outlines specific requirements and threshold which will raise the bar over time.

Meaningful Use is measured in stages and each stage represents a level of adoption.There are two main components to receiving incentives:

• Using a certified EHR
• Demonstrating meaningful use of EHR

Over the course of the next five years (2011-2015) the criteria for meaningful use will be divided into three stages:

Stage 1 (Years 2011-2012)

Stage 2 (2013-2014 tentatively)

Stage 3 (2015 tentatively)

The criteria will grow more severe in the later stages.

Here is a summary of the three meaningful use stages: 

·         Stage One: 

      The first stage is simply a question of quantity; the CMS wants doctors and hospitals to report how often the EHRs are being utilized, in terms of a percentage of patients.

·         Stage Two: 

      The second stage requires doctors to begin using the data contained in the EHRs when they diagnose and treat patients.

·         Stage Three: 

      The most important stage is the third, in which the CMS expects to give patients tools for self-management, and get caregivers to use the EHRs to identify when trends become national concerns, and improve overall population health.

There is no doubt that the Meaningful Use program has energized the health care industry, hopefully this energy will result in the innovation necessary to improve our healthcare delivery system.