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Vendor Lists Key Areas for Stimulus Package Investments “With funding from the package expected to soon flow to community-based HIEs, RHIOs [regional health information organizations], and healthcare systems, now is the time for organizations to be preparing for this new era of technology investments with ‘shovel ready’ solutions,” advises John Tempesco, vice president of client services and marketing at ICA. “Collectively, HIT stakeholders have a profound opportunity to create a more efficient healthcare system, with innovations that enable physicians and hospitals to become more strategically aligned and committed to working together to meet patient and payer demand for seamless care. These new funds will lead to increased physician involvement in the selection and deployment of technology, bringing clinicians and IT departments closer together in the delivery of enhanced patient care.” Tempesco points to the following five strategic areas where stakeholders can maximize the impact of HIT investments: • Preventing medical mistakes: While the majority of HIT once centered on the administrative aspects of medicine, any plan to roll out HIT should now be focused on making incremental improvements to the current workflow processes, refining them to a point where possible errors are eliminated or reduced to a minimum. • Providing better patient care: As the focus shifts from automating the business of medicine to the clinical practice of medicine, HIT investments must include aggregation of clinical data from existing technology to leverage investments already made while providing physicians with complete information to make informed clinical decisions. This cognitive approach to care will result in quality improvements. • Promoting preventive care: Proliferation of electronic medical records (EMRs) alone may reduce administrative burdens and improve care within an individual clinical setting; conversely, absence of the comprehensive community-based EHR negates advances in compliance with preventive care protocols. Aggregation of information and data facilitates a comprehensive, longitudinal medical record. Augmenting this complete view of patient information with disease and preventive care dashboards will allow each clinician, regardless of clinical setting, to be aware of individual patient noncompliance with recommended preventive care based on their demographics and disease state. • Evaluating the most effective healthcare treatments: Congress and demonstration projects implemented by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have traditionally focused on clinical measures, although there has been a change recently to focus on pay-for-results. With this current shift, interoperability, secure and deidentified data mining, and nonpunitive results reporting on patient data become key in evaluating the most effective healthcare treatments. • Introducing cost-savings and efficiencies: Hard costs can be eliminated through workflow improvements, such as secure clinical messaging throughout a community where the messages and attachments can be saved to the patient’s record; workflow enhancements to eliminate duplication of administrative tasks; visibility of diagnostic tests and procedures to reduce duplication of diagnostics; and the visibility of pharmaceutical replication, contraindication, and adverse multi-pharmaceutical interactions. Having a single point of access to complete patient information saves time for clinicians and also helps increase throughput by providing complete information to make the informed decisions on care vs. searching or waiting for information. |    
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