Dallas physican develops iPad app to manage electronic health records

January 16, 2013 --The size of the U.S. market for electronic medical records software was $2.8 billion in 2012, up from $1.9 billion in 2009, according to IDC Health Insights, an independent research and advisory firm, and it is expected to grow to $3.8 billion by 2015, The Dallas Morning News reports.

Only 30 percent to 40 percent of small and solo medical practices with fewer than three providers have implemented electronic health records, said Judy Hanover, a researcher at IDC.

That has created an opening for medical doctor Robert Abbate who runs OneTouchEMR, a Dallas-based startup that sells an iPad app that implements and manages an electronic health records system.

Abbate used his medical school training to develop the app, which mirrors the paper chart work flow of assessing and diagnosing a patient’s needs, making the process intuitive for doctors, he told the Texas newspaper.

[Source: Dallas Morning News]

Mining Electronic Records for Revealing Health Data

January 15, 2013 -- One powerful incentive for the switch to electronic records: the resulting databases of clinical information are gold mines for medical research, the New York Times reports.

"The monitoring and analysis of electronic medical records, some scientists say, have the potential to make every patient a participant in a vast, ongoing clinical trial, pinpointing treatments and side effects that would be hard to discern from anecdotal case reports or expensive clinical trials."

One example of how this might play out: Kaiser Permanente, which documented the connection between Vioxx and heart trouble nearly a decade ago by reviewing internal medical records, notes the Times, "is now testing preliminary evidence that men taking statin drugs for cholesterol have a lower risk of a recurrence of prostate cancer. The organization is also evaluating diabetes protocols, using a database of more than 25,000 people over age 80 with diabetes — a difficult population to study in clinical trials."

Again, this is being done by reviewing internal records.

[Source: New York Times]

More Changes in Health Care Needed to Fulfill Promise of Health Information Technology

January 7, 2013 -- Despite wide investments nationally in electronic medical records and related tools, the cost-saving promise of health information technology has not been reached because the systems deployed are neither interconnected nor easy to use, according to a new RAND Corporation report published in the January edition of Health Affairs.

"The failure of health information technology to quickly deliver on its promise is not caused by its lack of potential, but rather because of the shortcomings in the design of the IT systems that are currently in place," said Dr. Art Kellermann, the study's senior author and the Paul O'Neill Alcoa Chair in Policy Analysis at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.

Among the improvements needed: Health information stored in one IT system must be retrievable by others, including doctors and hospitals that are a part of other health systems. "This is particularly important in emergency situations."

Also, "Patients should have ready access to their electronic health information, much as consumers now have access to their bank accounts," said Kellermann and co-author Spencer S. Jones.

[Source: Rand Corporation]

Medicare Is Faulted on Shift to Electronic Records

November 29, 2012 -- The conversion to electronic medical records — a critical piece of the Obama administration’s plan for health care reform — is “vulnerable” to fraud and abuse because of the failure of Medicare officials to develop appropriate safeguards, according to a sharply critical report issued by federal investigators," the New York Times reports.

The report says Medicare, which is charged with managing the incentive program that encourages the adoption of electronic records, "has failed to put in place adequate safeguards to ensure that information being provided by hospitals and doctors about their electronic records systems is accurate."

Regulators are concerned that doctors and hospitals may be using electronic medical record to charge more (inappropriately) for services (as reported earlier by the Times, see "Medicare Bills Rise as Records Turn Electronic"). "Medicare expects to spend nearly $7 billion over five years as a way of inducing doctors and hospitals to adopt and use electronic records," reports the Times.

[Source: New York Times]

Medicare Bills Rise as Records Turn Electronic

September 21, 2012 -- Perversely, electronic health records may be contributing to billions of dollars in higher costs for Medicare, not lower, the New York Times reports.

That's because they can make it easier "for hospitals and physicians to bill more for their services, whether or not they provide additional care."

The Times described one system at an Illinois hospital that prompted doctors to check a box to indicate that they had conducted a thorough review of patient symptons, "even though the exams were rarely performed, while another function let doctors pull exam findings 'from thin air' and include them in patients’ records." Electronic medical records as currently construed simply make it too easy for doctors to "upcode," say critics, i.e., "seeking a higher rate of reimbursement than is justified," said the Times.

[Source: New York Times]