Conferences

Sharing Clinical Data, the First Step in Health Provider Collaboration

HealthCampBoston was one of several health care gatherings of the minds in Boston in the recent past and near future but the fact that it was an un-conference brought the potential for a much higher degree of engagement. Everyone brought an agenda, in the good sense. There were well balanced measures of questions posed and discussed, but ideas for solutions as well in the various breakout sessions. The format was very productive, and there was a sense of sharing and contribution from this unconference format which I believe is playing a significant role in the continued success of these globally spreading unconferences, instigated by Mark Scrimshire and his colleagues.

At HealthCampBoston, the convergence of thought around various challenges facing health care was evident. And this was not the development of a myopic view but a vision of a path through challenges.

To illustrate, I’ll dive into one challenge discussed in one of the sessions throughout the day-long unconference. The challenge was the major one of reporting clinical patient data by providers.  Most people agreed that this is necessary and may soon be required by providers seeking to qualify for economic stimulus funding for healthcare. Yet some providers are disinclined to do so as reporting exposes too much too quickly. Professionals in any field would hesitate at exposing business “tricks” on which they have become reliant. Provider offices faced with a difficult coding systems for billing sometimes place diagnostically inaccurate but monetarily accurate codes into health records for billing purposes, and so some fo these providers are understandably hesitant to have these seemingly harmless shortcuts cut short.

These shortcuts which can generate inaccurate data are not different than the many outside healthcare (just check out banking), but the impact of these shortcuts can be severe to individual patients when it concerns health records, as was evidenced by ePatientDave’s experience. At HealthCampBoston, a realization emerged that different solutions would have to be developed and used in concert to determine what would work best for providers and patients. John Moore suggested a virtual weigh station where patients would validate information before it was added to their PHR as a way to keep bad data out may be needed. Who better to manage one’s data than oneself. Another suggestion was that provider facilities would clean up the data before publishing it. You broke it, you own it. Another idea was to exclude billing data and only publish clinical data to PHRs, but this alone would not solve the problem. A physician noted that sometimes, non-billing related information such as temporary conditions (like pregnancy) were left on a patient’s record indefinitely. The convergence of thought came not from groupthink but from the realization that solutions often did not have to be mutually exclusive and that no single one is an obvious a silver bullet to this problem of effectively publishing and reporting clinical data that could be shared by providers and measured by payers, to align with paying for reporting and performance, which also brings other challenges.

The fact that there are incentives, both publicly and privately funded, aimed at providers which pay for reporting now and that they are being followed by a nascent wave of pay for performance incentives is heartening. The fact that there are now robust PHRs from Microsoft, Google, and others and that data can be electronically signed by the providers publishing this data also makes it more likely that increasingly clean clinical data will be provided for patients. I suggested that given choices, patients will reward providers who can a) publish data to PHRs at the request of patients and b) publish clean and complete data. This might be the best incentive and stimulus of all.

Tags: Company, conference, EHR, EMR, HealthCamp, HealthCampBoston, Healthcare, HealthIT, HIT, PHR, Technology, unconference

I am 5 foot, 11.75 inches tall; I enjoy helping clients and people I work with to achieve their objectives; believe that technology is a great enabler for the improved delivery of health care in the world, as it can be for so many other things.