Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Dealing with EHR Dissatisfaction (Part 5)

This post is a continuation; Part 1 is at this link. In this post, I describe a examine the question: When it comes to EHRs, whose satisfaction is important?

Someone commented that EHR “satisfaction is in the eye of who? The physician? patient? government? business?... I only hope it is the patient that wins out.” This comment is intimately tied to the question: Who should gain the most VALUE/BENEFITS from EHR/health IT use?

I contend that if they improve clinical outcomes and quality-of-life (through prevention and treatment), while they contain or lower costs to providers/clinicians and prices to consumers/patients (i.e., increasing value/benefits to the providers and receivers of care), then our society (and species) wins in the long haul. A business model that focuses on short-term gains for “me & mine,” rather than on realizing a longer-term vision that focuses on the common good, inevitably harms consumers and those who care for them.

Beneficiaries of this dysfunctional business model are manufacturers, politicians, lobbyists, providers, consumers and others who line their pockets by “gaming the system” through all sorts of unscrupulous (and at times illegal) tactics. Some might conclude that this is just “the American way,” but based on the huge waste of money and resources in the in the UK's health IT system (NHS IT system one of 'worst fiascos ever'), I believe it’s a consequence of capitalism that has lost its way, along with its sense of virtue.

I contend that the underlying cause of our broken healthcare system is our pathologically mutated form of capitalism —a term coined by John Bogle, named by FORTUNE magazine as one of the four giants of the 20th century and by TIME magazine as one of the world's 100 most powerful and influential people—which he said is a “fundamentally a blight on our society…It says something very bad about American society…ultimately, the job of capitalism is to serve the consumer. Serve the citizenry. You're allowed to make a profit for that. But, you've got to provide good products and services at fair prices…What we've done is have…a pathological mutation of capitalism” (see this link).

The rational way forward with regards to EHRs, I contend, is for clinicians to demand health IT tools that enable them to increase value to the consumer and demand fair compensation for doing so (Pay for Value). These tools should be low cost, flexible, ever-evolving, interoperable, and highly useable & useful for the clinician, patient, and researcher/informaticists. It should combine the best (and simplest) methods for data entry, analytics, decision support, and presentation (display), as well as secure transport and storage. They should also be efficient and accommodate workflows (including referral point-of-care, and mandatory reporting processes), and they should include the capabilities that include clinical concept parsing & processing (i.e., tools that improve the use of clinical notes and aid in inductive and deductive reasoning). In addition, they should provide ongoing risk-adjusted information to clinicians about their individual patients and population (cohort) outcomes.

The use of innovative EHR add-ons (companion applications) is a sensible way forward, even though EHR vendors may resist for business reasons that run contrary to the goal of increasing value for patient and provider, which is not surprising as per Bogle’s criticism and the need for "real capitalism, not crony capitalism that we have now in many industries, especially healthcare.” And while EHRs should be able to incorporate information directly from patients, it should also be able to associate and substantiate it with clinical technicalities.

These capabilities are simply way too much for any EHR today, but they can be achieved over time through collaboration that expresses our views and needs, embraces creative destruction, and suppresses regulatory capture that increases complexity, cost, and inefficiency.