Health systems, hospitals, and physician practices continue to implement models of accountable care, but do they have the EHR and health IT systems and services on hand to manage a patient population and the risk they have assumed?
A new guide to accountable care claims the technology is there but it requires some serious tweaking. According to Frost & Sullivan, “the current generation of electronic health record systems and patient accounting systems has the ability to act as the foundation for achieving the level of interoperability needed to operate a full population health technology solution.”
What needs be tinkered with or altogether removed are the barriers that keep data from flowing between care providers.
“Each venture into a specialized area of medicine invariably produced another independent IT system programmed to fulfill the operational requirements or service offered,” the report continues. “What is needed is a platform that allows providers and other members of a defined care team to communicate electronically in near real-time across the entire care continuum.”
Central to this new platform are commonality and standardization enabling the coordination of both the care and the information necessary for delivering care.
“There must also be an agreement on the nomenclature and labeling of health-related data fields, so there is a common intellectual database for retrieving critical patient care information,” the report explains. “This terminology must be standardized and universally accepted, so its combined clinical and financial impact can be applied, shared, and acted upon.”
Data must be handled in such a way to accommodate structured and unstructured patient data so that providers have access to a complete picture of the patient’s condition — what Frost & Sullivan calls the “360-degree scope and nature of care being provided.”
As important as what and how information is made available is where it is accessible — that is, at the point of care. The lack of point-of-care integration is fundamental to making sure population health management is part of the provider’s workflow whenever an encounter occurs:
Each time a patient or family member touches the care continuum, the contact should be considered a point-of-care encounter. Information from these encounters must flow seamlessly across the enterprise, so care team members have access to all of the patient data necessary to do their jobs. If current IT infrastructure and EHR capabilities do not support this capability, they will need to be enhanced.
So how are health systems, hospitals, and physician practices to begin their implementation to an accountable care organization or similar model? It begins with an extensive assessment of their current capabilities and readiness for the transition. Many health IT tools can be repurposed but if only they can be made patient-centric.
