Richard Cramer
ROI From Electronic Health Records is All About the Data, Not the Application
I’ve been advocating for years that replacing the paper chart with an electronic system is not the value of the EHR, but rather collecting data that can be used to understand and improve care. So I was very pleased to see Dr. John Showalter’s blog address this very issue – making a compelling case with real-world examples where wisdom derived from data has made demonstrable improvements in healthcare quality and corresponding reductions in cost. (more…)
People, Processes and Technology – Don’t Forget the TECHNOLOGY!
As a routine matter of delivering care, billing for services and operating their hospitals and physician practices, healthcare providers deal with patient’s protected health information all day, every day. Dealing with the data becomes routine and it’s easy for sometimes onerous security and privacy policies and procedures to be overlooked. While we’d all like that not to be the case, delivering healthcare (and getting paid for it) is a hugely complex undertaking and focusing exclusively on human processes and calling for constant vigilance and attention to detail can only go so far. (more…)
What Comes After EHRs?
Through the HITECH Act, the federal government is providing billions of dollars of incentive payments to healthcare providers to adopt certified electronic health record systems. However, realizing the full value of these investments is in jeopardy due to the pervasive data quality problems that currently exist within many healthcare provider organizations. Next week David Loshin, President of Knowledge Integrity and me are hosting a wide ranging discussion on healthcare data quality: what it is; why it matters so much; how we got in the mess we’re in; and what can be done to make things better moving forward. (more…)
I Don’t Like Rotten Applesauce
I had the good fortune to work in the information services department at UMass Memorial Healthcare for several years prior to joining Informatica. It was pretty clear when I was there that the investments UMass Memorial was making in information systems was the future direction of healthcare everywhere, and that the lessons being learned there had applicability across the broader healthcare market. Since joining Informatica, I have had the opportunity to meet with a wide cross section of our healthcare customers and prospects, and I can confirm that this is in-fact absolutely true. A good case in point is the recent discussion I had with Karen Marhefka, Associate CIO at UMass Memorial, about the challenges of poor data quality and the adverse impact this can have on migrating existing data to new applications. (more…)
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