The Kaine administration has been doing some useful things behind the scenes, but because of my monomaniacal fixation on transportation, land use, energy and the environment, I have not had time to highlight the more positive initiatives. With this post, I hope to make up for that deficit to some small degree.
One of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s priorities has been to increase the efficiency of Virginia’s health care system by encouraging physicians and hospitals to adopt electronic health records. Until this week, none of these endeavors had resulted in anything terribly newsworthy. But on June 12, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt visited Richmond to announce Virginia’s participation in a Medicare initiative to promote the use of certified electronic health records (EHRs).
Leavitt thanked Kaine, legislators, members of his cabinet, and Michael Mathews (CEO of MedVirginia), and others for developing a winning application. The project, one of 12 in the country, will provide financial incentives to as many as 100 primary care physician practices in Virginia to use certified EHRs.
If there’s anything close to a silver bullet for out-of-control health care expenditures, it’s probably EHRs. Let me rephrase that. There are no silver bullets. But of all the remedies discussed, getting physicians, hospitals and other health care providers to adopt electronic records would do more than any other single thing anyone can do to cut costs and improve patient outcomes.
The U.S. health care industry has been notoriously slow to adopt electronic records. A majority of physicians still make hand-written notes, which are sometimes illegible and lead to transcription errors. Paper records also are far more difficult to share, resulting in redundant and unnecessary procedures when a patient moves to a new setting. Although systems with computerized provider order entry have existed for more than 30 years, fewer than 10 percent of hospitals as of 2006 have a fully integrated system, according to Wikipedia.
According to one 2004 estimate, one in seven hospitalizations occurred when medical records were not available. Additionally, one in five lab tests were repeated because results were not available at the point of care. “The evidence is too compelling and the stakes are too high to maintain [the] status quo,” said Mathews, the MedVirginia CEO.
MedVirginia, Virginia’s Regional Health Information Organization, is the logical group to take the lead in the Medicare initiative. Since its inception in 2001, the organization’s vision has been to create “the most electronically connected medical community in the United States.” In 2005, MedVirginia developed the capability to collect patients’ hospital, lab and pharmacy data and organize it into one single electronic chart. The key now is to get all players to use electronic records.
Medicare will begin working with Virginia in the summer of 2009 to build partnerships and develop strategies to recruit Virginia physicians into the program. It’s a shame we have to wait a full year just to start work on this important project. More.
