Health IT Law Blog : Health IT Law Blog : Post & Schell: Law Firm : HIT & Electronic Health Records

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its report on integrated delivery systems (IDSs) in healthcare. The report found that electronic health record systems (EHRs) are able to improve patient care among such IDSs.

Via GAO:

Some IDSs said that using EHRs supports their patient care strategies such as care coordination, disease management, and use of care protocols by increasing the availability of individual patient and patient population data and by improving communication among providers.

All 15 IDSs which took part in this study have implemented EHR systems. Mayo Clinic, one of the participants, reported that "the EHR helps avoid overutilization and duplication of services."  Several other IDSs reported significant savings because of EHR use, including Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin, which reported that its e-prescribing feature reduced "errors related to illegible handwriting and unintentional drug interactions." In addition, Marshfield's EHR requires physicians to consider appropriate "preferred alternatives" for prescription drugs, saving payers and patients $2.5 million in 1 year.

You can find the full report here.

"Health Care Delivery: Features of Integrated Systems Support Patient Care Strategies and Access to Care, but Systems Face Challenges," U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-11-49 November 16, 2010.

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A new study by the Ponemon Institute concluded that data breaches cause enormous losses for U.S. hospitals:  on average, over a two-year period, each hospital will incur about $2 million in losses due to data breaches, which results in $12 billion cumulative loss for all U.S. hospitals.

The study also found that:

• Most healthcare organizations experience undetected breaches of patient data due to lack of preparation and staffing. 71% of healthcare organizations reported having inadequate resources, 52% reported having appropriately trained personnel, and 69% reported having insufficient policies and procedures in place to prevent and quickly detect patient data loss; thus leaving such organizations with little or no confidence in their ability to appropriately secure patient records.

• Protecting patient data is not a priority for 70% of hospitals, with 67% reporting having less than 2 staffers dedicated to privacy and security issues.

• 71% do not believe the new federal regulations pursuant to the HITECH Act have significantly changed the management practices of patient records.

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Will American healthcare providers, like major companies in other sectors of the economy, outsource their electronic medical records systems and maintenance offshore, especially to an established tech industry in India? According to the Wall Street Journal, Indian technology vendors face a significant amount of skepticism regarding outsourcing health IT to India. 

While major tech companies routinely utilize data centers, service desk and other products and services in India, healthcare providers are not used to such outsourcing arrangements.  Indian IT companies like HCL, InfoSys, and Wipro are trying to tap into the booming health IT market in the United States. However, they face a number of important challenges, including concerns over privacy, security and integrity of protected data, breadth of experience in the industry,and ease of implementation of such systems.  One prominent CIO described this challenge succinctly in the Journal:

Designing and installing new medical systems 'is hard to do off site, let alone offshore,' says Darren Dworkin, chief information officer of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Cedars-Sinai is close to finishing a four-year, $100-million project to install an electronic medical-records system. Mr. Dworkin says that 80% to 90% of the work isn't the sort of commodity coding that is easily outsourced, instead requiring an intimate knowledge of the hospital's terminology and how its doctors and nurses work.

You can read the full article by clicking here.

"Qualms Arise Over Outsourcing Of Electronic Medical Records," Wall Street Journal (November 2, 2010).

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