National Health IT Week: What it means for you

By Jill Powelson

 

September 15-19 was National Health Information Technology week. The focus of National Health IT week is to:

“Raise[s] awareness of Health Information Technology’s power to improve the health and health care of patients across the nation. National Health IT Week celebrates the efforts that have been made through the use of Health IT —and are being made—in the transformation of how care is delivered, health information shared, quality measured, reimbursements dispersed, and patients engaged in their own health and health care.”   Healthit.gov/healthitweek/

Baptist has made huge improvements in its health IT infrastructure in 2014, with the implementation of integrated Baptist OneCare electronic health records at several of our hospitals and most of our physician practices. Providers using OneCare are able to seamlessly see their patients’ information in multiple Baptist environments of care, and therefore they can transition patients more smoothly between settings. Baptist recently purchased and implemented a health information service provider, which will allow secure two-way communication of vital patient information between providers and facilities that are not on OneCare. This secure data exchange during transitions of care is a Meaningful Use requirement. More importantly, it is expected to improve patient safety and quality of care, reduce health care costs, and increase patient satisfaction.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT released a 10 year plan in June 2014 for the future of health IT, particularly focusing on interoperability.

The ONC’s 10 year plan states, “An interoperable health IT ecosystem makes the right data available to the right people at the right time across products and organizations in a way that can be relied upon and meaningfully used by recipients.” Baptist shares this vision. Our investments in health IT will lead to improvements in patient safety, population health management and patient engagement. One example of a 10 year vision from the ONC plan is:

“Individuals manage information from their own electronic devices and share that information seamlessly across multiple electronic platforms as appropriate (health care providers, social service providers, consumer-facing apps and tools, etc).”

It is exciting to think about our patients being able to access their health information through MyChart on their mobile device as easily as they can update their Facebook status. Health care is changing rapidly. Some say that the degree of transformation that will occur in the next few years is similar to the changes hospitals experienced when DRGs were implemented in the 1960s. Each of us has a role to play in maximizing the value of the investment Baptist has made in health IT. We can realize the potential of OneCare to increase health care value by providing high quality care in the most efficient way possible, with the patient at the center of everything we do.

 

Jill Powelson, RN, MBA, MPH, executive director of quality for Baptist Medical Group, was recently named to the national Health IT Fellows program of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. There are 55 Fellows nationally. Fellows communicate with the ONC about Meaningful Use and the use of health IT to improve health care value.