Continuity of care or accountability of care is unlikely without Medicare Shared Savings and Meaningful Use health IT incentives for mental and behavioral health providers.
What would you call a physician who sewed up a patient’s wound without addressing the behavioral health issue that led to the injury? We might cynically label the doctor disinterested or inattentive; we might sympathetically call her distracted or overwhelmed. But it might be far more accurate to say the doctor lacks information.
What's the technical solution for the health IT interoperability challenge? Do you know? You probably should. Chances are you interact with it frequently.
In anticipation of House of Cards Season 4, and with all due respect to the show's creators, I think real life is giving us a perfect plotline that includes politicians, corporate interests, their lobbyists and a big fat government contract.
A show of hands: Who believes depression or bipolar disorder have no impact on the severity and treatment of a patient’s diabetes and COPD? It's an idea no practicing physician would support. Yet time and again, we act as though mental illness and care can be kept separate from physical ailments.
Interoperability is the current health IT buzzword because it's the essential ingredient in creating a system that benefits patients, doctors and hospitals. Almost everyone in healthcare is pressing for it and is frustrated, though probably not surprised, that meaningful use did not get us there.
Take a step back from the challenges that surround health information technology interoperability and you will recognize that market forces and a desperately fragmented healthcare system make hospitals and vendors act the way we do.
As reported last year at HIMSS and by many online news and opinion sources since, physician dissatisfaction with EHRs is growing. Indeed, while this blog post doesn't focus on the broader picture, general physician career dissatisfaction is disconcertingly high.
Is healthcare a business? In the United States, the question has been asked time and again but never satisfactorily answered. It's starting to look like Americans won’t be able to duck the question for much longer.
So, why is VistA CPRS the preferred choice? In a word, design. The VA built the system with two design goals: improved patient care and rapid adoptability.
