by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | April 24, 2015
From the April 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
HCBN: What challenges do your members face?
PK: There is a great demand on their time, both personally and professionally. The field is moving so fast, with government requirements, demands of software certification, updates to quality reporting measures, and user demand for access to legacy systems. The landscape is also changing, on the quality and value payment front. And all these new technologies cost money, so it puts a stretch on the IT budget. And let’s not forget keeping the data secure. That’s another challenge that has grown in importance.
HCBN: What have been your goals as chair?
PK: Because of my background as a family doctor in a rural setting, I’ve been sensitive to the needs of smaller communities and practices, thus my work with rural providers, small and critical access hospitals. And HIMSS has increased its focus to reach out and provide support for them. There’s talk about how all facilities will merge into larger systems. But that is not always possible or even in the best interest of the community.
Those small facilities need the analytics so that they can market themselves, justify their existence and compete in the marketplace as we migrate toward paying for value. Patient engagement and patient empowerment has also been an important goal of mine — where the patient, family, provider and health care team work together to improve health. It’s a more collaborative way of doing things, and I think with the changes in the way payment reform is headed, that’s going to be seen as more valuable. Patients more actively involved in their care have better outcomes and better experiences, but that is going to take a paradigm shift for many.
HCBN: What are the biggest changes to information management today?
PK: We’ve evolved from information management on paper to EHR silos, to electronic information coming in from multiple places that we need to make sense of. There’s also an enormous amount of data within the EHR that will come from patients due to exercise trackers and other self-monitoring devices. In addition the C-CDA (consolidated clinical-document architecture), delivered to a provider can come from multiple locations.
These C-CDAs can have so much in them that finding the important information is a challenge. Primary care doctors, cardiologists, endocrinologists, ophthalmologists — they will all have C-CDAs. When information for a new patient shows up on my desk I have to make sense of it. How do we package it so a provider can get what they need without having to sort through a lot of chaff?
