Healthcare IT is critical to accountable care
Healthcare IT is critical as hospitals begin to make the change from delivering volume-based care, to delivering value-based care. While many people have questions about how these accountable care models will actually work, it is clear that it boils down to a shift to providing more personalized care, more preventive care and taking waste out of the healthcare system. This is where healthcare IT becomes essential to success because we will need to have transparency and a level of data sharing that are nonexistent for most systems today.
A recent article in HFMA explains the role of healthcare IT this way:
Healthcare IT will play a pivotal role in supporting the evolution of organizations from the currently fragmented, transaction-oriented care delivery model to a fully accountable, coordinated model. To appropriately take responsibility for a population, providers need a complete understanding of the care and services they provide. Integrating data from inpatient and outpatient settings will help providers produce the actionable information around quality and cost improvement opportunities that are so essential to organizations’ success.
But for the majority of health systems today, IT-facilitated care coordination across the continuum of care is limited. To succeed, providers need seamless care coordination with sophisticated capabilities for measuring population health status that can help them improve health status and reduce overall cost.
Population health data management refers to the IT enablement of the clinical and administrative aspects of care, with the goal of improving health outcomes. It goes far beyond an electronic health record and requires IT resources to collect individual health status data as well as to stratify and target populations based on their risk and need for care. It also requires tools to:
1. Engage people in managing their health using patient health records or online portals
2. Provide connectivity to a health information exchange to ensure portability of records
3. Direct physicians toward appropriate, evidence-based care protocols
Equally important, all of these IT systems must be interoperable, and data must flow seamlessly among them.
We need data that allows us to gauge our performance and the performance of clinicians. Data that allows us to benchmark ourselves against other hospitals and health systems. It is time to take healthcare to the next level and as we do so, we will work more efficiently and more effectively for the patients we serve.
Mike Stephens blogs regularly at Action for Better Healthcare.
