Patient Centered Care and how Health IT lets doctors listen

Healthcare Reform Should Start with Primary Care

As I have been advocating for the last year technology actually allows medical providers more time to spend with patients, lets them provide better care that is patient focused and results in higher quality outcomes while increasing their incomes in most cases.

Today on the front page of the business section of the New York Times is a great article discussing many of the same topics.

doctors spend more time with patients, emphasize prevention and education to keep them healthy and can handle many medical problems without referrals to specialists.

Here in Seattle I belong to a clinic that uses the Medical Home model and my former employer Group Health Cooperative is rolling out the same model to all of their primary care Physicians and Providers across the State. You can read about those two models in a great article in the Seattle Times. Technology allows small practices to compete with larger multi-speciality centers by putting the tools right into the hands of providers at the point of care.

With big pharma and insurance pulling out the stops to block the public option it would make sense to provide everyone with primary care under this new model and leave insurance to cover the high cost episodic care.

Time Out - is the Patient in the Room? in the Health IT conversation

Did you see this morning? I posted a quick response to it. The only way to achieve a high quality, effective, safe, patient centered system is to start and center the conversations and the design process around patients from the beginning.

Meaningful Use of Health IT - a Consumer Perspective

In order for a health IT system to have real value it must include the voice of the consumer in its design, policy and use. Patients expect physicians to be responsive to their needs and preferences, to provide them with access to their medical information, and to treat them as partners.

Building on the vision of patient centered care, we expect

1) Participation - we expect that patients, consumers and family members will be pro-actively included in the design, development and use of any health information technology system.

2) Location - we expect that the tools developed will be delivered where we live via mobile phones, sms, the web and not solely in a providers office. A shift from a "medical home at the doctors office" to a new perspective that puts the patient / consumer in their home with easy access to health care resources.

3) Information and convenience - real time access to information, including not only our medical records, labs, clinical notes but the ability to both share and control the sharing of that information with other providers, to designated family and our own personal health records seamlessly.

4) Engagement - The ability to enter "patient notes" in the clinical record alongside nursing or physician notes (flagged as patient entry). Email access to our care team as well as questions answered online and via the phone with full participation in treatment plans and follow-up.

5) Safety - we expect our providers and health care facilities to use registry's, clinical alert systems and quality outcomes to monitor our care and to include anyone who desires it to receive clinical alerts customized for their needs as well.

6) Security and Data Liquidity - we expect that the ability to share our medical information will be as secure and as easy as the banking system is and that the value of the data (if sold) will be shared with us.

7) Feed-back loops - we expect that our providers, health care systems and ancillary providers will have feed-back loops and patient satisfaction systems built in.

8) Quality - we expect to have access to quality reports on treatments, facilities and providers with no risk from patients participating.

Sherry