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I don’t know about you, but I was thrilled to hear about today’s launch of MEDS-ED Link, a project of the Northern Virginia Regional Health Information Organization (NoVaRHIO) in conjunction with Inova Health System and GE Healthcare.
As an insider in healthcare for more than 20 years, today is an exciting day for me. Picis, the company I co-founded with Liz Popovich and helped grow into an international software company with 700 employees, is being acquired by Ingenix, a leading HIT, consulting and services company with nearly 6,000 hospital clients around the world.
This is a classic “win-win-win” situation that will benefit us, Ingenix, and all our customers and prospects. With all that is going on in healthcare industry today, I can tell you from the heart that the timing was perfect for this transaction, and this is truly the best possible home for Picis in which to grow and prosper.
HIMSS is always a great conference, but I have to admit – on my flight down to Atlanta, I was slightly dreading four days of endless hypotheses around meaningful use. The understandable theme of this year’s show, meaningful use, has quickly escalated from an exciting and game-changing initiative to one that has even the most optimistic healthcare enthusiasts scratching their heads and drowning in buzzwords, overpromising and under-delivering. It was only at last year’s HIMSS that one of the largest HIT vendors claimed they had meaningful use nailed down (only weeks after the announcement of the initiative) but when tested, couldn’t give a straight answer on what it meant or how it would deliver value to patients.
This year, however, I’m already noticing a reality running through HIMSS that I was pleased to find. This year’s sessions have revealed that a lot of attendees are more comfortable admitting the reality of the situation; that they are just now really understanding the challenges that this will bring. I overheard an IT executive from one of the most prestigious and well-regarded health centers in the world claim, “If we’re not sure that we are going to be ready by 2011, I can only imagine what others are facing.”
The transition of patient care and documentation from one provider to another has always been a challenge for the healthcare industry — disconnected hospital systems can lead to a game of “telephone” with important patient data (on paper or verbally,) which is both inefficient and risky. I have been involved for years in connecting systems together, and the complex interfaces that have been used to do this in the past have been a headache — plus, they have not achieved the seamless “plug and play” that we have seen from other industries. Nobody worries about what brand of mouse or keyboard they purchase anymore, they plug it in and it works. When will we see this kind of Valhalla for medical systems?
Soon, hopefully. Government organizations are now getting involved in setting standards for healthcare systems to work together. I have never seen so much progress and I couldn’t be more excited about it. A lot of this effort is around something called a CCD, or continuity of care document. There are different forms and different names, but they all boil down to a document that summarizes an episode of care, with structured data around things like medications, allergies and a problems list, which can be consumed and used in any system that touches the patient. There is a central “library” that these documents are submitted to, and then can be “checked out” at any time so that the most accurate information is always available to the physician.
