The end of the year provides us a chance to take a much-needed rest and do some reflecting over the past 12 months. Over the last few years, I have taken this time during the last week of December to look back over all the interviews and presentations I covered for Healthcare Informatics during the year and pull out my favorite quotes. Here are my top 10 quotes for 2015:
“Meaningful use, for all the good intent, in our system was disruptive. It had people focusing on teaching to the test and not being innovative or asking important questions.”
-- Intermountain Healthcare Chief Medical Informatics Officer Stan Huff, M.D.
“We do not see tremendous transformation in medical process delivery from technology. Does the EHR change work flow? Yes, it makes it worse. How many physicians love your EHR? Doctors hate EHRs. Buying physicians EHRs does not lead to a successful quality program or cost containment program.”
-- Christopher Olivia, M.D., president of Continuum Health Alliance, an ambulatory care services company, speaking at the Population Health Colloquium, put on by the Thomas Jefferson University School of Population Health in Philadelphia in late March.
“Innovation requires collaborative genius. If you are an inventor, the odds of you going it alone and succeeding are very small.”
-- Paul Nagy, director of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Technology Innovation Center, speaking about how his organization brings together teams of designers, developers, architects and analysts to work with inventors to build, deploy, and evaluate clinical IT innovations.
“What were profit centers in the fee-for-service world have become cost centers, and what to commercialize is fundamentally different.”
-- Troy Keyser, health information technology manager within the business development team at Partners Innovation, talking about his focus on expanding health information technology adoption within and outside of Partners HealthCare.
“It is astounding how many organizations are creating enterprise-wide data warehouses and dumping in massive amounts of data without knowing about the stewardship of each data source.”
-- Larry Yuhasz, senior director of innovation and population health at Truven Health Analytics
“If you changed your title to data scientist on LinkedIn, you would have 50 job offers by the end of the day.”
-- Keith Figlioli, senior vice president of healthcare informatics at Premier Inc.
“Too often we focus on meaningful use measures and the patient portal. Those are important, but we want to figure out how to build tools that engage people so much in their healthcare that they check their health app as much as they check Facebook. By marrying clinical with patient-generated data, can we create a full picture that they start to care about? That is the nut we are really trying to crack.”
-- Pamela Landis, assistant vice president, information services, at the 42-hospital Carolinas HealthCare System.
“It is a tragedy that in 2015 we are talking about how poorly EHR vendors are doing with family history. We need EHR vendors to do better.”
-- Howard Levy, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
“The Interstate Medical Licensure Compact [for telehealth] says you can get a duplicate license faster, but it doesn’t change the fact that you still need a duplicate license. Instead of eliminating this barrier, it just says you can do it quicker….You still have to get them, not for safety reasons, but just because state medical board wants to line their pockets and retain control. Every doctor has to take nationwide competency exams. This is about protecting a guild system started in the 1600s and 1700s.”
-- Joel White, executive director of the Health IT Now Coalition
“I don't understand why in 2015 I'm hiring a third party to get medical records for a chronically ill child.”
-- Megan O’Boyle, principal investigator of the Phelan-McDermid Syndrome Data Network and the Phelan-McDermid Syndrome International Registry, part of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Network (PCORnet). Her daughter has Phelan-McDermid syndrome, which is at the severe end of the autism spectrum. She eventually gave up on trying to get her daughter’s data and contracted with a third-party company to act on her behalf getting the data from 16 healthcare facilities.
