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EHR

Apr 29 2015

Why I got a QR code tattooed on my sternum

By e-patients, EHR, health records, healthcare industry, medical records

I’ve been heard here on the topic of getting a barcode tattooed on my neck to avoid having to fill out another one of those damned forms-on-a-clipboard at a medical provider’s office. I’ve also been heard all over the interwebz (mostly Twitter) on the excrescence that is poly-portalitis syndrome (PPS), caused by the plethora of portals presented by providers under current EHR adoption drive.

In late 2013, I had a V-8 forehead slap moment, realizing that a QR code – I have created several of those, including the one (different than the tattoo!) on my business card – would be a great way to accomplish my objective. QR code reader smartphone apps are in relatively common use, and I also figured that a tattoo would be a conversation starter in the rooms where I work to shift the medical-industrial complex’s thinking on patient engagement and participatory medicine.

Even though it took me over six months to find a tattoo artist willing to do this – and I live in the 3rd most tattooed city in America, according to a Today Show story in 2010 –  and then another couple months to gather the shekels to pay for it, almost a year ago, on June 18, 2014, I presented myself at Graffiti’s Ink Gallery for my inkapalooza.

This was not my first tattoo rodeo. I had done what I thought was required due-diligence in researching the size and pixel resolution on the QR code itself, and had had a couple of meetings with the artist to make sure we were on the same ink dot. I created a page on this site, password-protected it, created a QR code that linked to that page, and we were good to go.

On that page, after you plug in the password that’s inked at the bottom of the tattoo (and is not fully visible in any picture of it that has been shared online, anywhere), you see two documents:

  • My Microsoft Healthvault [MSFT shut down Healthvault in 2019, I’ve moved my data to GetRealHealth‘s Lydia app] export document in PDF, which has
    • My full health history back to Year 1 of my life
    • Medication record, past and current
    • Allergies
    • Emergency contact
    • Primary care MD info
    • Insurance info
  • My Advance Directive (everyone should have one – build your own by clicking this link)

I think I scared the artist-kid during the actual tattooing process, by the way. For the uninitiated, getting a tattoo on a bony part of your body – skull, spine, STERNUM – can hurt like a mother. I have a large, 5 color tattoo on my right shoulder blade that, 20+ years later, I can still recall hurting pretty hard during its application. I knew going in that this would be ouch-y, but at [redacted] years of age, after navigating cancer treatment and other slings and arrows of outrageous medical fortune, tattoo ouch-ies ain’t a thing in my world.

The artist had, I discovered later, booked out 3+ hours on his schedule for me that day, figuring that I’d be asking for frequent breaks due to the pain of application. I didn’t stop him once, and he finished up in just over an hour. He looked at me in a way that made me think he was waiting for me to eat some broken glass, or a couple razor blades. Again, given my time on the planet and my life experience, 60+ minutes of having my sternum hammered by a tattoo needle wasn’t a big deal.

Why did I do this? Because I’ve been waiting for the medical-industrial complex to deliver on their promise of health information exchange (HIE), the promise that they’ve been making for years, but have yet to fork over. I can, and do, securely move money around the globe at the click of a mouse. I do it via bank accounts, purchase agreements, contracts with clients. Most people do. But my healthcare record – which is MINE, as much as it is the property of the medical providers who gave the care it describes – is in fractured bits and pieces all over ever’where.

So I rolled my own, and nailed it to my sternum. Any questions?

Feb 18 2015

EHR technology: Match.com without a happy ending?

By EHR, health records, healthcare industry, media commentary, medical records, technology

My last two posts explored the question of the doctor/patient relationship in the context of romantic relationships. The first one asked if we were anywhere close to getting engaged, the second looked at the possibility that the whole enchilada needed some intervention-level relationship counseling.

In the couple of weeks since, I’ve had some interesting digital and face to face conversations about digital communication tools, patient engagement, and the doctor/patient relationship that have led me to ask if the crop of EHR (Electronic Health Record) systems in current use across the land, as part of Obamacare’s drive toward healthcare system quality, safety, and access (or, as I like to put it, to the tune of “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” EHR, HIE, E-I-E-I-O!), aren’t analogous to online dating sites like Match.com.

healthcare cupid imageWhich leads me to the observation that the EHR tech I see – all of it, from Epic to Practice Fusion to athenahealth to NextGen to Cerner – can in many ways be compared to Match.com. You put in personal data – name, personal details, outcome goals – and the technology (supposedly) helps you toward your goal. With EHR, that’s best-health, with Match.com, it’s a romantic relationship, but both take data input, digitize it, and claim to provide solutions based on that input.

And I have to say that my observed success ratio on both EHR technology and online dating is similar. As in: mostly it feels like “failure to launch.”

So … go grab a cup of coffee, or a bottle of water. This will be a lengthy look at that question, but I promise to bring it home with at least a couple of laughs along with my pointed observations.

The leading lights of healthcare IT haven’t made the doctor-patient relationship any easier to create and maintain than Match.com has for romatic relationships. For every success story, there are hundreds (thousands? millions?) of examples of bitter frustration. With the billions (yes, with a B) spent on buying and implementing EHR systems, the phrase “meaningful use” – which was supposed to be the demonstration of clinical and patient communication tools to enable better quality healthcare – has become a punchline.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared a post from The Health Care Blog by Bob Wachter, an interview with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO John Halamka, on my social media channels. In it, Halamka said that only 3% of patients wanted their health records kept locked up tight behind virtual doors, so he had to lock up the data of the other 97% to keep the 3% happy. When I shared that post on my LinkedIn profile, it opened a conversation about that statement, such as what the heck the underlying facts to support it were.

“It’s interesting that the 3% figure was not referenced. I am not in the health informatics field, nor do I have time to do an in depth literature review for discussion. However, a quick Google search yields several informative studies. One small study (n=30) of patient preferences found that patients wanted granularity in terms of what they want to share, or not share. No participant wanted to universally share ALL information. Another study (n=105) reported that 1 in 2 patients hid medical information from their own doctors.”

In other words, is that 3%/97% statement the equivalent of creating convenient details about yourself on an online dating profile? When I asked a few people in the e-patient zone about this, I heard this story about how a major health records system in Boston [spoiler alert: Halamka’s IT system] basically spewed garbage instead of useful patient health history data when they opened the data taps to the now-dead Google Health. So, apparently it’s exactly like confabulating facts on an online dating profile. Also, some additional reading led me to a story on CIO about an epic system failure, also in Boston [spoiler alert: I’ll let you figure out what/why], that tied up an entire hospital network’s system for five long days in November 2002.

Back to my metaphor, of EHR tech being analogous to online dating. If the communication partner you’re talking to says they’re a 42 year old architect in Cambridge, or the lab that’s just completed the path report on your biopsy, can you trust what they’re saying? Is there accessible, verifiable information to support the claim? Can you believe what you’re seeing? Can you even SEE what’s really there?

Both of those scenarios rely on trust, and a sense of security. And the ability to actually SEE. WHAT’S. GOING. ON. As Mordac, the “preventer of information services” in the Dilbert comic strip, says, “Security is more important than usability. In a perfect world, no one would be able to use anything.”

I had the opportunity last week to be part of the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)’s first Patient Engagement Summit in Orlando. Yep, more acronyms – E-I-E-I-O. The two panels I was part of talked about the current state of the doctor/patient relationship, and the overall event was all about how technology can either support, or hinder, that relationship. The crazy part is that both the clinical side of healthcare – doctors, nurses, researchers – and the patient side – the rest of us – are desperately determined to get engaged (with each other), get married (create the best possible outcomes), and live happily ever after (better community health for EVERYBODY!).

The trouble is, I’m afraid, that the tools that are supposed to be the grease on the rails to making that happen – the digital communication systems that hold our care data – are set up by Mordac. Screaming headlines about stuff like the recent Anthem breach are like screaming headlines about sharp rises in sexual assault figures – they’re a real buzz-kill for trust between possible relationship partners.

If you actually know me, you know I’ve taken a rather extreme step toward fostering relationship clarity, doctor/patient-wise. It’s the image that is my Twitter avatar (click that link to see it), and it is a real 3×3″ QR code tattooed on my chest. I can’t say that it has any effect on my dating profile (I bailed on online dating years ago), but it has made many of my healthcare-relationship interactions … interesting.

Can I, or any of us, trust health IT and EHRs to help make our healthcare relationships happy and successful? Or are we stuck in the slough of despond that is Match.com?

Nov 17 2014

#epatient – Are Millennials Born That Way?

By e-patients, EHR, health records, healthcare industry, participatory medicine

Most of the people I meet in my voyages ’round healthcare system transformation, grassroots edition, arrived at the portal of #epatient via a trip through the medical-industrial complex. Either they, or someone they cared for, wound up getting “a thing” – cancer, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, player to be named later – and they found themselves inside the medical care delivery system, bewildered, and looking for answers.

In short, most – not all, by any means, but most – are over 40.

Imagine my surprise, and delight, when I was sent a report on a survey conducted with 385 randomly selected patients across the US*, with most of the responses coming from 18 to 35 year old millennials (people born 1982 and after). The survey asked them their opinions on shared decision making, open notes, and shared medical visits, three new medical practice models that are rising in adoption.

Here’s the context of the survey questions:

  • Shared decision-making involves the doctor and patient evaluating multiple treatment options and deciding together on the best course of action.
  • Open notes is a policy allowing patients to view the medical notes doctors take about them during visits, which includes accessing those notes from home.
  • Shared medical appointments, or “group visits,” involve attending an extended (60- to 90-minute) medical appointment with 10 to 15 other patients and one or more physicians.

The survey results make me think we might finally be reaching a tipping point toward positive change, given that a big majority (76%) of respondents said they were extremely or very likely to use shared decision making. Over 60% were extremely or very likely to welcome open notes:

Millennial PM Likelihood 4

 

The demographics of the survey respondents was a pretty representative sample as far as chronic conditions go:

Millennial PM Chronic Disease

One surprise in the demographic detail was that more men responded than women. Given that, historically at least, women have been more likely to use the medical care system (annual Pap smears, reproductive health visits) than men, the fact that men outnumbered women in this gives me even more hope. Are dudes getting it? “It” being that their health is their responsibility, and that a relationship with a good primary care provider is a good life plan.

Millennial PM Gender

To recap, millennials want shared decision making and open notes. Shared/group appointments, not so much. I think that the shared/group appointment approach would be best deployed in “building health literacy” settings: condition-specific education on diabetes, for example. I also think that telemedicine needs its own survey, given that practice model could be used both real-time or asynchronously via secure video links.

The millennial generation has grown up with digital tools and instant access to information. I seriously doubt that they’re going to be willing to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous wait times, or outrageous balance billing, when they seek medical care. Hope for real system transformation may have crested the distant horizon, and be riding toward us. May its speed be supersonic.

*Source: Practice Management systems consultancy Software Advice
Aug 26 2014

The State of Health Information Exchange: Benefits and Challenges

By EHR, health records, healthcare industry, technology

This is a guest post by TechnologyAdvice.com writer Jesse Jacobsen. TechnologyAdvice.com is based in Nashville, TN, and their stated mission is to provide valuable insight to business technology buyers, while creating connections with the products and vendors that best meet those buyers’ needs. Their site is a goldmine of industry-specific intel on current software and IT products and trends … and they have a dedicated healthcare tech content channel!

graphic of tablet with EKGAccording to the 2013 HIMSS Analytics Report, 73 percent of respondents indicated they were participating in health information exchange (HIE), with 57 percent only participating in a single HIE. Of the practices in an HIE, 52 percent reported experiencing benefits with better access to patient information, 20 percent experience promoted patient safety, and 12 percent said HIE led to time savings among clinicians. Only 16 percent reported no benefits.

As evidenced above, HIEs can be effective tools for improved practice operations, but that doesn’t mean the system is foolproof. In the same report from HIMSS, the top challenges faced by hospitals included other organizations not sharing enough data (49 percent), lack of necessary staff (44 percent) and resources (40 percent), and privacy concerns (39 percent).

As government mandates continue to push provider use of electronic medical records (EMRs) and HIEs, more practices are beginning to consider if it’s time to participate in a health information exchange. The following will look at some of the current benefits from HIE participation and address some current challenges.

Benefits

Better Patient Information

HIEs provide physicians with easier access to patient information, especially on a state level, such as the recently implemented HIE in Florida. Currently, accessing patient information can be a costly and inefficient process, with too much reliance on faxing and email. Utilizing an information exchange makes gaining patient data a quick process with far fewer expenses.

Reduced Imaging Duplication

By reducing duplication of diagnostic tests, physicians can heavily reduce expenses and increase practice efficiency. According to a study from the University of Michigan, around 20 percent of all scans performed by emergency department clinicians were considered repeats. When hospitals used HIEs, patients were 59 percent less likely to have a redundant CT scan, 44 percent less likely to get an additional ultrasound, and 67 percent less likely to have a repeated chest X-ray. Eliminating such duplication can result in significant cost savings for providers, patients, and payers.

Improved Care and Reduced Errors

Simply put, when doctors have quick and easy access to patient records, they can make informed and effective treatment decisions. Without access to this information, physicians are basing diagnosis and treatment decisions on a narrow view of their patient’s health history. With quick access to a longitudinal view of a patient’s health history, physicians can see current and past prescriptions, previous diagnoses, reactions to medications, and any other pertinent information. This information is essential when prescribing medication to ensure that new prescriptions won’t adversely interact with current medication that patients are taking. Between 26 and 32 percent of total medication errors are caused by administrative errors. These are potentially fatal mistakes that can easily be prevented with proper HIE implementation.

Use in Emergencies

For patients in emergency situations, time is of the essence. Being able to access patient information from HIEs helps clinicians act quickly and responsibly. In 2009, the average time spent being treated in emergency rooms was four hours and seven minutes, an increase of 27 minutes since 2002. Increased treatment time in the ER results in increased wait times, which on average took six hours in 2009. ER doctors can decrease patient interaction and wait times with quick and easy access to patient records from HIEs, including information on allergies, past treatments, pre-existing conditions, and applicable test results.

In addition, emergency departments can use HIEs to reduce expenses and unnecessary admissions. According to a study conducted by Weill Cornell Medical College, the chances of a patient being admitted to the hospital was 30 percent lower when the HIE was used, leading to estimated annual savings of $357,000. Decreasing unnecessary admissions also results in shorter wait times.

Challenges

Security Concerns

A report published by the Bipartisan Policy Center found that 25 percent of clinicians cited privacy and liability concerns as barriers to participating in health information exchanges.  The argument behind these security concerns is logically sound; if HIE affiliates have increased ease of access to patient information, who else might have this increased access as well? How can we be sure that sensitive patient and practice information is secure? After all, HIPAA violations are quite expensive.

While this concern is justified, most HIE affiliates recognize this potential shortcoming and have established a wide array of policies to prevent any information leaks. For example, when electronic requests for patient information from a healthcare provider are made from an unknown provider, most HIEs refuse to provide any data. As these platforms for data exchange continue to advance and increase in adoption, more policies and safeguards will be put into place to ensure the security of patient files.

Inconsistent or Insufficient Information

Many healthcare providers who have already integrated HIEs into their practice complain that insufficient patient information and inconsistent filing methods are a huge hindrance to HIE success. Data fragmentation is already an issue for the healthcare system as a whole, costing up to $226 billion per year.

Unfortunately, this is a challenge will take time and continual effort to alleviate. As more hospitals and practices begin sharing data, and as the government groups continue to establish detailed, reasonable standards for patient records, data silos will be broken down.

Insufficient Funds

For many providers, developing HIE networks makes very little sense strictly as a business investment. According to a study from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 74 percent of respondents listed developing a sustainable business model as a moderate or substantial barrier to HIE deployment, in addition to a high level of concern about a lack of funding (66 percent).

To tackle this issue, some practices are joining cloud-based HIEs, which charge monthly fees, alleviating the heavy upfront costs typically incurred by other systems. These pay-as-you-go systems can become more expensive than their counterparts however when used for a long period of time. Additionally, transferring patient information through the cloud presents a potential security concern. But, for cash-strapped practices seeking a means to effectively exchange data, a cloud-based community could be the answer.

Lack of Infrastructure

Similar to lacking proper funding, many healthcare providers list a lack of infrastructure as a major challenge with HIE. A survey from Doctors Helping Doctors Transform Health Care found that 71 percent of respondents listed lack of infrastructure as a primary challenge. Adding infrastructure is not only expensive because the infrastructure itself is pricey, but also because the labor and resources required to outfit new systems are expensive as well.

Again, selecting a cloud-based solution can alleviate many infrastructure shortcomings. Cloud systems require very little on premise infrastructure to gain access, and accordingly require minimal labor investment to setup. While building the proper infrastructure to maintain a normal HIE is recommended, cloud-based options are growing in popularity and accessibility, making it a viable solution for smaller practices and struggling health care providers.

HIEs are far from perfect, but the information and resources they provide can add value to practices everywhere. Unfortunately, many of the improvements that need to happen to HIEs simply require time and commitment from a large volume of healthcare providers. The technology is there, and eventually the commitment and investment from practices will be as well.

Jul 27 2011

Data, Data, Who’s Got My Data?

By e-patients, EHR, health records, healthcare industry, medical records

 I’ll totally get one. Srsly.

I confess that I’d happily get a barcode tattooed on my neck if it meant I’d never have to fill out another ****ing health history form in a doctor’s office.

I’m totally serious.

Paper records are so … 19th century. With the advent of the current iteration of “health care reform” (which is really “health INSURANCE reform,” but that’s a blog post for another day), much has been made of the importance of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems in building a national Health Information Exchange (HIE).

Medicine = Acronym World. The Pentagon are pikers when it comes to fogging the battlefield with impenetrable letter-fication.

21st century health care certainly must involve a lot of easily-shared data, with health history and diagnostic information traveling literally at light speed between doctor’s offices, hospitals, and clinics. Not only does it speed care, it can ensure safety: the right record, with the right patient, makes the right care clear.

The thorny-issue part is this: whose data is it, anyway? Doctors certainly need to have full access to all the data on patients they’ve treated. Hospitals have to keep records on the people they’ve treated on their wards, in their clinics, and in their ORs. Payers (insurers, Medicare, Medicaid, et al) need data access to pay claims, track demographics, and create statistical and financial forecasts. And patients must have access to their own data, at minimum to vet it for errors, at best to own a full copy of their health history since birth to share with providers and care-givers.

I spent 8 months trying to correct an error on the report for the breast MRI I had in 2008 as preparation for my cancer surgery. The report said “family history of breast cancer.” NO. I was Patient Zero, there was NO family history of breast cancer. I fought for eight months, and I’m still only about 90% convinced the error is completely expunged. Patients need access, and we also need easy recourse to error-correction.

Back to EMRs and data exchange: access to patient data must be completely available to all concerned parties. That means doctors, healthcare facilities (hospitals, clinics, et al), and PATIENTS. However, the discussion about healthcare technology almost never includes patients. We’re considered, at best, bystanders; at worst, annoying insects.

E-Patient Dave DeBronkart – Mr. Gimme My Damn Data himself – was the 1st person I heard use the term “e-patient”. The E stands for empowered, engaged, enabled, equipped, equal – not electronic, although that’s certainly a supporting foundation for the e-patient movement. E-patients are usually placed in the “annoying insect” category by healthcare providers who don’t want to share – which can include payers, who can turn a simple record request into a Bleak-House level of bureaucracy. The most epic story in recent history, IMO at least, is Regina Holliday’s now-famous 73 Cents post (and the painting it talks about) – charging patients for access to their own data (at 73 cents a page) borders on the immoral, if not the criminal.

In the long slog through working groups, committees, implementations, and reports-to-the-board that is EMR and HIE development, don’t let the healthcare system leave us – the patients – out of the conversation.

It might be their data, too – but at root, and always, it starts with us. It’s theirs, yours … ours.

Data, Data, Who’s Got My Data?
Jan 05 2009

A Great Story On Healthcare IT

By EHR, health records, healthcare industry

In today’s Health Care Blog, David Kibbe MD and Brian Klepper PhD continue a discussion that they kicked off with an open letter to the incoming Obama administration in December about health care IT and electronic medical records (EMR/EHRs).

Patients think that EMR/EHRs are the answer to their prayers – no more forms to fill out, no referral slips to carry around, hey-presto, it’s all on this flash drive. What Kibbe and Klepper point out is that’s just the tip of the iceberg:

“…we are realistic about the problems that exist with health information technologies as they are currently constituted. As we described in our previous post (and contrary to some recent claims), most products are NOT interoperable, meaning licensees of different commercial systems – each using different proprietary formats – often find it difficult to exchange even basic health care information.”

In other words, let’s not create a tower of Babel just because IT tools exist that will let us. There’s enough failure-to-launch across the medical-care sector now: forests of paper records that are a bear to manage, much less share; HIPAA standing like Colossus over every single one of those sheets of paper; and the rising tide of ‘perfect EMR solutions’ that have been developed in the last few years.

There is no ‘perfect solution’ – what’s required is that healthcare realize that it’s an IT business, just as every other commercial sector has come to realize over the last decade.

“…many health care professionals still think of health IT as a compartmentalized function within health care organizations. But health IT has increasingly become the glue between and across all health care supply chain, care delivery and financing enterprises. In the past, it was enough for health IT to facilitate information exchange inside organizations – in which case a proprietary system would do – but we now expect information to be sent and received seamlessly, independent of platform, including over the Internet. Most of the currently dominant EHR technologies don’t even begin to get us there.”

As someone who has recent experience as a patient managing cancer treatment, the idea of having my records securely available to any medical practitioner in the U.S. via the internet sounds like Utopia. An achievable Utopia, if the incoming administration listens to the rising chorus of voices asking for exactly that.

Add yours to the chorus.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…

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