The key to healthcare reform, say some experts, lies in collaboration. But how does one get hospitals and physicians to work with each other?
That question was tossed about often during the opening sessions of the Institute for Health Technology Transformation’s Spring Summit, held May 12-13 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. And it seems clear from the discussion that there are no easy answers.
“Physicians must be able to exchange information with hospitals, but they (hospitals) do not want to play,” said Bernd Wollschlaeger, a Florida physician and member of the South Florida Regional Extension Center’s steering committee. “We need to change the mindset from confrontation to collaboration.”
HITT’s Spring Summit, which drew roughly 230 healthcare executives and vendors to Florida, kicked off with opening remarks from Alan Portela, president of CliniComp, the San Diego-based electronic medical record provider for the U.S. Military Health System, among others. Portela pointed out that, whereas the last 10 years could be characterized as the decade of the best-of-breed solution, this decade can be described as the decade of the EHR, as providers ditch disparate and legacy systems in favor of an all-encompassing, open-source solution.
More importantly, Portela said, as the nation’s healthcare providers are faced with incentives and penalties to adopt and use healthcare IT solutions, the trend for the next decade will be “best-of-suite functionality,” as providers seek to plug the critical gaps in automation caused by replacing and/or upgrading bits and pieces of their system.
That doesn’t bode well for independent physicians and small practices that are already far behind hospitals and health systems in adopting electronic medical records.
“For the clinical practice, it’s literally a paradigm change,” said Wollschlaeger. Among the problems faced by small providers, he said, are “silo mentality,” “analysis paralysis,” and a reimbursement system that still favors quantity over quality.
Some have suggested that the small physician practice is rapidly becoming an endangered species, as physicians determine they don’t have the resources to survive on their own and hospitals and health networks find it easier to absorb physicians into their organization rather than deal with them as independent entities.
Steve Wasson, vice president of clinical solutions for RelayHealth, says healthcare providers are overlooking the importance of small physician practices and independent networks, particularly as they try to advance health information exchange initiatives and seek federal incentive grants. HIE efforts, he said, have to begin at the local level and meet clinical needs before expanding outwards.
“You can’t get to those lofty goals until you start taking some small steps,” he said.
And that, said conference attendees, begins with learning how to collaborate.
“People need to understand the basics of what it means to exchange information,” added Tom Gomez, principal architect and director of program management for Florida International University’s HIT Initiative.