Health Care IT Plans Get a Renewed Push

Computerworld - Several slowly emerging health care technologies were given stimulants last week, as President Bush called for the development of electronic medical records and two health care industry groups took steps to encourage the use of automated prescription-ordering systems and bar coding on drugs.

In a speech last Monday, Bush described paper-based approaches to maintaining medical records as "antiquated" and said that within 10 years, he wants all U.S. citizens to have electronic records that can be transmitted among health care providers. Use of the technology could reduce annual health care costs "by billions of dollars," Bush proclaimed.

In a related development on Friday, the Washington-based Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations closed the public comments period on a proposed rule that seeks to jump-start the use of bar-coding technology by hospitals to correlate patient identification data with medications. The rule would require the use of bar codes by January 2007 to ensure that patients receive the correct medications.

Also last week, The Leapfrog Group, a Washington-based organization made up of 150 large employers and insurers, said it plans to start posting on its Web site the results of surveys it conducts to see whether hospitals have adopted 30 patient-safety practices, including the use of computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems. Leapfrog officials said the postings are an effort to steer patients to hospitals that have instituted the procedures it recommends.

Dr. Brian Jacobs, director of technology and patient safety at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, said the separate developments "lit a fire underneath health care IT." But Jacobs cautioned that development of truly portable electronic medical records could take more than 10 years. He said his hospital has difficulty exchanging information among four internal systems from different vendors, let alone with other hospitals.

Jacobs added that although technologies such as electronic medical records and CPOE could improve patient safety, it's difficult to pinpoint a hard-dollar return on investment that health care providers could get from such projects—other than a potential reduction in lawsuits stemming from medical errors.

But the Center for Information Technology Leadership, an organization in Wellesley, Mass., that's backed by Partners HealthCare System Inc. in Boston, has identified a total of $86 billion in annual savings that hospitals, insurers and other industry participants could realize by standardizing the exchange of information, said Eric Pan, a researcher at the center.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last year commissioned a unit of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington to design a model of an electronic patient record that health care companies could use at no charge .