Health IT

What would you do with $700 billion?

We've written often about the need for more health information technology (used wisely in combination with other delivery reforms as the CBO has made clear). We have also written that patients will be more comfortable with electronic medical records when privacy breaches stop making headlines.

What do Britney Spears and Farrah Fawcett have in common with California First Lady Maria Shriver? How soon we forget: someone snooped in their medical files. The California state Senate hasn't forgotten.

The Health Affairs Web site has several perspectives on Health IT, as well as the first in a series of companion essays on what it all means.

Looks like we aren't the only ones excited by the iPhone's potential application to medicine.

At an Alliance for Health Reform briefing on Health Information Technology and Its Future (we blogged about it here) earlier this summer, an audience member asked why can’t we have access to electronic health records the same way banks have ATM cards? ATMs allowed banks to cut costs and improve service, so why can’t it work for health records?

Community Health Network, based in Indianapolis, thinks it can. On Wednesday they launched myCommunity, a new service that offers participating patients credit-card-sized myCommunity health records and a mobile eCommunity network, according to the Indianapolis Star. Using the same technology that's in the express check-in kiosks at airports, the myCommunity cards can be swiped at kiosks in hospitals to instantaneously provide doctors with information about a patient’s allergies, medications, past medical history, insurance, and emergency contacts.

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Medicare reform is in the air this month, with events and forums all over Washington (even more than usual—it's not exactly like Medicare is ever off the table in D.C.).

One problem identified by quality improvement initiatives is that even when we learn that something works, it takes a long time to be adopted by a critical mass of doctors or hospitals. We need to figure out how to disseminate the information better, and develop incentives to get it acted on quickly.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee has approved the PRO(TECH)T Act, advancing legislation that would help doctors and hospitals acquire Health IT systems and speed up the process of moving federal health programs into electronic medical records.