Information Leads to Automation
The move to electronic medical records — digitizing and properly recording health care data into a networked, automated system — will improve more than just the bottom line at hospitals and other health care facilities. It will also bring automation that will help saves lives and prevent complications, and it just might turn the insurance industry upside down too. That was the conclusion of industry experts at the University of Miami Global Business Forum, held Jan. 12–14, 2011, during a panel discussion titled “How Advanced Data Storage and Mining Is Transforming Health Care and Changing People’s Lives.”
It is time for hospitals and other providers to move away from written records, said Maria Currier, chair of the national health care and life sciences team at the law firm Holland & Knight, which sponsored the panel. “We are in the information age, and we need to bring health care into the 21st century,” she said. “We are in critical need of modernizing and automating our system.”
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Joe E. Kiani, Chairman and CEO, Masimo Corporation |
Neal Patterson, chairman and CEO of Cerner, the largest stand-alone provider of health care information technology, said he is hopeful that once written records are converted into electronic medical records and properly indexed, the industry will become automated within five or 10 years. That, in turn, will enable doctors and nurses to receive essential data that could save lives and prevent complications. For example, he said, imagine the value of a system that alerts a provider to a blood-borne infection in a patient that could cause a stroke if there isn’t a proper response within six hours.
Patterson also predicted that such automation would drive health insurance companies as we know them today to extinction. When innovations occur in an industry, the entities in the middle go through the most radical transformation, he said; in this case, insurance companies will be replaced by an intelligent “middle” entity that is more focused on patient outcomes. “I believe that the biggest effect of [digitizing records] is that health insurance companies will be eliminated as they exist today,” he said.
For a true health care IT revolution, professionals in the field need more accurate data. Masimo Corp., which makes noninvasive patient monitoring devices such as pulse rate and blood composition monitors, hopes to facilitate that, according to Joe Kiani, the company’s chairman and CEO. He said Masimo is focusing on wireless devices that can feed patient data to an automated system, allowing physicians to more easily “fill a piece of the puzzle” on a patient’s condition.
Unfortunately, gathering health information really can be like putting together the pieces of a puzzle, with critical data scattered among different providers. “You can get health care in a mall, in a school, in a church,” but right now those services are not connected, said M. Narendra Kini, president and CEO of Miami Children’s Hospital and a specialist in pediatric emergency medicine. Electronic medical records should make it much easier to keep that information in one place.
Of course, having lots of information is one thing, understanding it is another, and doctors and nurses may be challenged to use all the new data that these technologies will provide. Multitasking minds can only handle two or three goals, at most, said Terry Rajasenan, senior vice president of the data processing company ProcessProxy Corp. “We are taking on so much and we think we are juggling it all but we really aren’t,” he said.
New software will need to help clinicians deal with all that information, but won’t replace them in the decision-making process. “When I think of computers in health care I think about chess champions,” said Kini, who once oversaw information technology for GE Medical Systems. It took several years for IBM to develop a computer capable of defeating chess champion Garry Kasparov, Kini said. “Treating a human body suffering multiple organ failures is like playing several chess games at once. … In the new models of health care … doctors are going to be key.”
Instead of replacing clinicians, IT systems will dispense data in a manner that doctors and nurses can understand. Rajasenan’s company, for instance, developed a program that funnels data into actionable information, based on research funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
On the consumer end, health care IT is advancing so quickly that it has outpaced our ability to use it properly, Kini warned. For example, Wal-Mart will soon introduce a $99 online plan that will give health care recommendations based on four blood tests. “They claim not to be in the business of health care provision,” he said, “so no records are kept.” Other types of testing are also approaching home availability.
That’s a lot of information being generated for consumers. “What is that information worth to a consumer? What do you do if it falls in the hands of others, like lawyers and insurance companies?” Kini asked.
By Erik Bojnansky
