Entries from April 2009
Ashish Jha, Assistant Professor of Health Policy & Management at the Harvard School of Public Health and practicing physician at the VA, discussed the digitization of health records on NPR’s OnPoint on Wednesday, April 22. You can hear the entire episode here at OnPoint Radio’s site: http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/04/tracking-electronic-medical-records. My favorite quote, in response to why automate a broken system rather than fix the fundamental problem:
“We can’t fix the healthcare system without IT, but IT alone can’t fix it.”
Dr. Ashish Jha also recently published an excellent article entitled Use of Electronic Health Records in U.S. Hospitals in the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Jha and colleagues found that only 1.5% of hospitals have comprehensive electronic medical record (EMR) systems and an additional 7.6% have basic EMR systems. Hospitals cited capital costs and high maintenance costs as primary obstacles to adoption. President Obama’s plan for every American to have an electronic health record by 2014 appears even more ambitious in light of these numbers.
Dr. Ashish Jha will be speaking at the Public Health & Technology Conference on Friday, May 1 at the Harvard School of Public Health. Details of the conference and free registration are available here: www.hsph.harvard.edu/phat.
Categories: current events · health information technology
Tagged: electronic health records, phat, ashish jha, public health, digitization, public health and technology conference, NEJM, harvard school of public health
The Public Health & Technology on May 1, 2009 schedule is below. It’s not too late to register: www.hsph.harvard.edu/phat. I will post all the video on this blog as soon as it is available.
| 10:00 am, Kresge Ground Floor |
| Registration Begins |
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| 10:30 am, Kresge G-2 |
| Introduction – Health Information Technology: Where are we in 2009?
Ashish Jha, MD, MPH, Professor, Health Policy & Management, Harvard School of Public Health |
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| 11:00 am, Kresge G-2 |
Panel – Health Information Exchange
- Moderator – Blackford Middleton, MD, MPH, MSc; Director of Clinical Informatics Research & Development; Chairman of the Center for Information Technology Leadership (CITL); Partners Healthcare System
- Ray Campbell; Executive Director & CEO, Massachusetts Health Data Consortium
- David Cerino, MBA; General Manager, Consumer Health Solutions Group, Microsoft Corporation
- John Loonsk, MD; Vice President, CGI Federal, Inc.
- John Moore; Founder and Managing Director, Chilmark Research
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| 12:30 pm, Kresge G-1 |
| Keynote – Connecting Patients, Providers, and Payers
John Halamka, MD, MS; Chief Information Officer, CareGroup Health System; Dean for Technology, Harvard Medical School; Chairman, New England Health Electronic Data Interchange Network; CEO, MA-SHARE; Chair, US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) |
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| 1:30 pm, FXB Atrium |
| Networking Lunch with Speakers and Invited Guests |
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| 2:30 pm, Kresge G-1 |
Panel – Health Information Technology & the Stimulus Bill
- Moderator – Karen Bell, MD, MMS; Sr. Vice President, Health Information Technology Services
- Jonathan Bush, MBA; CEO, President, & Chairman, AthenaHealth
- Sharona Hoffman, JD, LLM; Professor of Law and Senior Associate Dean, Case Western School of Law; Co-Director, Law-Medicine Center
- Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD; Director, Boston Children’s Hospital Informatics Program; Professor, Pediatrics and Health Sciences & Technology, Harvard Medical School
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Categories: current events · health information technology · public health · technology
Tagged: ashish jha, blackford middleton, conference, david cerino, isaac kohane, john halamka, john loonsk, john moore, jonathan bush, karen bell, public health, public health and technology, ray campbell, sharona hoffman
The HSPH Public Health & Technology Forum is hosting the 1st annual Public Health & Technology Conference on Friday, May 1 featuring keynote John Halamka, CIO of Boston Beth Israel Deaconness Hospital and Harvard Medical, and panelists Karen Bell (ONC), Blackford Middleton (Clinical Informatics Research & Development, Partners HealthCare), John Loonsk (ONC), John Moore (Chilmark Research), Ashish Jha (HSPH), Isaac Kohane (Boston Children’s Medical Informatics Program), Jonathan Bush (AthenaHealth), Sharona Hoffman (Case Western Law School).
Despite health IT’s promise of better, faster, and cheaper health care, adoption of electronic health records in the US remains low. This conference brings together many of the leaders in the field to explore the potential to use health IT to improve health delivery, the challenges of health information exchange and the impact of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on health IT.
Categories: current events · health information technology · public health
Tagged: health information exchange, phat, public health and technology, john halamka, isaac kohane, john loonsk, john moore, ashish jha, jonathan bush, sharona hoffman, blackford middleton, karen bell
A great article in Business Week from April 7, 2009: How Kaiser Permanente Went Paperless. Describes Kaiser’s $2 billion electronic health record implementation and the resulting benefits. The major conclusions:
- Return on investment is a wash at best, although quality improves in some areas
- Implementation isn’t transferrable to small providers
Categories: current events · health information technology · technology
Tagged: bussiness week, ehr, electronic health records, kaiser permanente, paperless, quality
