“We’ll get support if we do it right,” said Finch.
The federal government has been spending tens of billions of dollars on the adoption of information technology by healthcare providers. Individual doctors were incentivized approximately $40,000 apiece to adopt information systems that could communicate electronic records to other providers (“interoperability”). The primary-care providers of the Hudson Valley have been among the most aggressive adopters of information technology under this legislation.
“People need to become aware,” said Kevin Dahill, president of the Suburban Hospital Alliance of New York State, a consortium of 51 not-for-profit and public hospitals on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley. “There’s massive transformation going on.”
Already wrestling with implementation deadlines, the hospitals are also struggling to build secure, accurate and up-to-date electronic health records that will share data among patients, payers and providers. These are tasks not accomplished in a day. It takes years of preparation to build an information system worthy of a high degree of public confidence. One horror story can be enough to undermine years of careful preparation.
The accurate sharing of critical information among healthcare providers is particularly important in so-called “transitions of care” such as a referral from a primary-care provider to a specialist or the discharge of a patient from a hospital. “Critical information is required for the next provider to appropriately care for the patient,” said Dr. Holly Miller, chief medical officer at MedAllies, a Fishkill-based organization specializing in the implementation of medical health records, “but today that doesn’t always happen.” Research shows, Miller added, that patients retain about half the information given them by healthcare providers.
