Using Health IT to Improve Patient Care

The main challenge to successfully implementing health IT isn’t the technology aspect, but rather how to understand, digitize and improve clinician workflow, speakers at the CompTIA Tech Summit said on Thursday.

“You are re-engineering the way medicine is practiced in healthcare settings,” said Bethany Gilboard, director of health technologies for the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative.

Physicians can sometimes be resistant to a new model of patient care, said Charles Jarvis, vice president of healthcare industry services and government relations for NextGen  Healthcare Information Systems.

“You have to look at a new way of doing things, a more collaborative model of patient care,” he said.

Critical to the success of implementation is to find an advocate for the technology in the office, Jarvis said. For different physicians, this may be a love of gadgets, frustration with the current system or simply wanting to be able to make improvements to the way patients are treated.

“You can build on that, you can make them the hero in the practice,” Jarvis said.

While physician offices successfully implementing health IT initiatives can receive reimbursement from the HITECH Act, that should be considered the “icing on the cake,” said Mike Jones, CEO of ETG. “You can provide better care, drive out other costs, improve the quality of your data.”

All of those things can help create a more patient-centric healthcare system, said keynote speaker Dr. Carolyn M. Clancy, director of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

The AHRQ's mission is to improve the quality and effectiveness of healthcare. The agency has created the “National Quality Strategy” to guide national, state and local efforts, focusing on better care, healthy communities, and affordable care.

The strategy’s priorities include reducing harm caused in the delivery of care, promoting effective communication and coordination of care, and making quality care more affordable by developing and spreading new healthcare delivery models.

“We want to make the right thing to do the easier thing to do,” Clancy said.

The AHRQ has a website dedicated to health IT at http://healthit.ahrq.gov. The Office of the National Coordinator also has a list of dedicated Regional Extension Centers at http://healthit.hhs.gov/portal/server.pt?open=512&mode=2&objID=3519.