More Managed Care Companies Offer EHR Services

Main Category: IT / Internet / E-mail
Also Included In: Medical Practice Management;  Public Health
Article Date: 20 Mar 2009 - 7:00 PDT

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The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday examined how an increasing number of large managed care companies have begun to use electronic health record systems to "help solve the age-old problem of getting patients to take better care of themselves."

According to the Journal, through the systems, the companies -- such as Kaiser Permanente and Group Health -- have begun "delivering reliable health information directly to patients to help them manage their conditions and make treatment choices" and "offering online self-management programs and virtual coaching sessions for a wide range of health issues." The companies have begun to offer such services amid concerns from physicians that "patients surfing the Web for medical information aren't necessarily finding the most reliable and current data," the Journal reports.

Paul Wallace, medical director of health and productivity management programs at Kaiser Permanente and a director of the not-for-profit Center for Information Therapy, said, "Information therapy can help bridge the transition from (doctors) doing things to and for people, to helping [patients] become active participants in their own care" (Landro, Wall Street Journal, 3/18).

Opinion Piece
The adoption of EHR systems by physicians involves a "big investment in money and time" that can prove "daunting," but the practice is "good for medicine and for the patient," Marc Siegel, an internist, an associate professor of medicine at the New York University Langone Medical Center and a member of the USA Today board of contributors, writes in a USA Today opinion piece. According to Siegel, the $19 billion provided in the economic stimulus package for health care information technology, which includes the adoption of EHR systems, "has focused too much on the labor pangs and not enough on the baby."

In addition, Siegel writes that physicians have a number of "good and fair questions" about the adoption of EHR systems: "How will we implement it? What will the costs be? What about privacy?" However, physician offices that have EHRs systems operate "like ... a machine" because patients "can be processed more quickly, files are instantly accessible and -- most important -- accuracy in care has improved," according to Siegel. He adds that the funds provided in the stimulus package for adoption of EHR systems are needed "because the government is the only engine big enough to drive such a massive systemic transformation."

The "lives saved in the long run will more than justify the costs," Siegel writes. Adoption of EHR systems is "good for the patient, and what's good for the patient is good for the country," he concludes (Siegel, USA Today, 3/18).

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

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