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Richard Bankowitz, M.D., enterprise-wide chief medical officer of Premier, discusses his organization's experience with quality-based purchasing. Premier healthcare alliance's core program in this area, the CMS/Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) program, has seen an overall average improvement in measured patient care quality of 17 percent during the first four years of the HQID demonstration project. The program is cited in a recent study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine as evidence that pay-for-performance programs can be useful for all types of hospitals, particularly those that care for impoverished populations.
The Peter Christiansen Clinic, which is part of the Lac du Flambeau Reservation in northern Wisconsin, has seen tangible benefits in improved healthcare to its patients, as well as significant cost savings since going live with electronic health records five years ago. Michael Popp, who is the clinic's IT manager, clinical coordinator, and HIPAA officer, explains how the clinic uses EHR to track diabetes, the No. 1 diagnosis among its patient population, as well as gain better control over its billing and account receivables.
Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, and chairman of the HIT Policy Committee Information Exchange Workgroup, explains how the workgroup is pursuing the use of state directories to support provider and patient information exchanges, as well as public health reporting. It is one of the first in the country to focus on this particular issue.
Paul H. Keckley, Ph.D., executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, Washington, D.C., which follows disruptive innovations in healthcare, comments on the findings of “The Mobile Personal Health Record,” which states: “The personal health record embedded in mobile communications devices is the ‘killer app’ that may change the game for providers, consumers, and payers.” The key, he says, is that relatively inexpensive and widely used mobile communication devices could both send and receive patient data.
Members of the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), who responded to a recent membership survey, expressed relative optimism regarding their organizations' potential for fulfilling the requirements of Stage 1 meaningful use under the federal American Reinvestment and Recovery Act/Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (ARRA-HITECH) Act, and therefore, regarding their chance to obtain HITECH funding. Rich Correll, CHIME's president and CIO, gives his perspective on the survey's findings.
Healthcare Informatics 2010 November;27(11):4
