Top hospital IT execs eye rollout of electronic health records

Computerworld - ORLANDO -- More than 60% of top hospital IT executives responding to a survey said they plan to deploy computerized electronic health records over the next year, according to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), which released the survey results at its annual meeting here.
Last month, President Bush strongly backed the use of electronic health records in his State of the Union address, saying that computerizing health records would help "avoid dangerous medical mistakes, reduce costs and improve care." An electronic health record consists of computerized patient information -- including background medical history, charts and digitized diagnostic information -- that is viewable and accessible by patients and their doctors.
Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House and now head of the Center for Health Transformation in Washington, said at an HIMSS news conference that he would like to see a crash effort to develop standards, which would make the use of electronic health records possible by September.
Gingrich said the development of standards for electronic health records -- which would convert many of today's paper-based health care records into digital information -- is "not rocket science" and would help cut unnecessary costs from the nation's multitrillion-dollar health care budget. He cited as an example the massive, multibillion-dollar National Health Care IT project in the United Kingdom, which is designed to provide every person in England with an electronic record.
Rick Copple, chief technology officer for information services at Indianapolis-based Community Health Network, said he sees development of a standards-based electronic health record within the next two years as "a challenge, but not impossible."
Copple added that the challenges are primarily related to industry politics, such as getting vendors to agree to standards down to the protocol level. Electronic medical records that would be accessible by a wide range of end users, including patients as well as health care workers, also need to have tight security, he said.
Community Health operates five major hospitals plus numerous other medical facilities in central Indiana.
To illustrate the staggering growth in health care costs, which he believes IT can help control, Gingrich said that the Department of Defense's budget for providing health care to active-duty military personnel and their families will soon equal its procurement budget. In other words, unless there is a dramatic curb on health care costs, the department will soon spend as much on health care in a year as it spends on equipment.

Gingrich urged health care providers to adopt a model similar to that used by