WASHINGTON (FRONTLINE MEDICAL NEWS) – Although the leadership at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is new, the focus of the federal office – reducing physician burden and improving interoperability of electronic heath records – remains the same.
“One priority is on the whole question of burden of [EHR] usability,” said Don Rucker, MD, the new national coordinator, at a July 11 press briefing. “The other is interoperability. We’ve obviously spent a lot of money collectively in the country on these systems, and there’s a widespread dissatisfaction with the level of interoperability.”
ONC can help in a number of ways, according to Dr. Rucker, an emergency medicine physician and biomedical informatics expert.
“We are looking at documentation and the whole quality framework around value-based purchasing,” he said. “For a lot of practices now, this has become a challenge that we just have to think about what’s the win. At some point, the expense of complying with the quality measures is a much greater expense than the innate value of the quality measures. ”
EHRs “have become symbolic of physician administrative burden, but by no means are they the whole cause,” John Flemming, MD, ONC deputy assistant secretary for health technology reform, said at the briefing. “The physician, particularly in an independent practice, must manage the practice. So he or she is the CEO. They are also on the assembly line, seeing patients. Now with EHRs, they have to be the data input person as well. It’s time consuming.”
Dr. Fleming is a family physician from Louisiana and a former Republican member of congress.
Dr. Rucker acknowledged that reducing the burden of EHRs has been discussed for quite a long time now. He recalled beginning working with them in his private practice back in 1988 and figured, based on the quick rate of technological innovation demonstrated in Silicon Valley, the issues would be solved by 1992 or 1993 at the latest.
“Right now, [EHRs] are really about documentation, about billing, but that is a funny kind of beast,” he said. “Every other industry uses their enterprise computer software to do automation, to become more efficient. We are the only business that I am aware of to have used computers to become less efficient. … I think part of what we are trying to do … is let some of these newer technologies that will actually reduce costs, reduce variance, have those technologies have an entrée into some of these data collections that are out there.”
