It's flu season. Just yesterday (Sept. 22), I heard on the news Michael Kurtz, a pediatrician in Centennial, Colo., south of Denver, say that in the last 10 days his three-office practice, which has 35,000 patients, had diagnosed 30 to 50 cases of swine flu a day. These diagnoses were not lab confirmed, he said, but the pediatricians in Centennial were confident they were on the mark. They tested for two strains of flu – influenza A and influenza B. State officials told them that 98 percent of positive influenza A tests are the H1N1 flu.
I repeat this snippet I heard on the radio to point out that swine flu – and Type B flu – have already begun this season, and the number of cases are beginning to grow.
Doctors everywhere and local, state and federal health officials are advising against showing up in emergency rooms. But, we all know people, especially those that the government has designated as “underserved” – probably a euphemism for “uninsured” – will do just that. There are not a lot of options.
Mike Gerardi, MD, an emergency room physician in New York, knows that when there is an outbreak of flu, people flock to the emergency room. He has the numbers to prove it.
In Gerardi’s world – 21 hospitals in New Jersey and New York, with emergency departments that see a spike during outbreaks – those numbers are invaluable.
Gerardi and John Rothman, his tech partner in doing right and being smart, put business intelligence technology to work (Page 1) on tracking emergency room activity and giving hospitals a sense of what to expect.
IT helps hospitals staff up at the right time. It means doctors can better treat the patients and minimize the wait time and the exposure to communicable diseases.
Gerardi says he does not understand the reluctance of some physicians to put technology to work for them. He’s excited, he said, by the potential. And, whenever he has a particularly thorny problem he figures a little technology applied the right way might solve, he calls on Rothman.
It’s the sort of partnership between healthcare providers and IT teams that occurs more often than we know, and one that should serve as a model in hospitals and physician practices across the country.
HIMSS, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, recently named the recipients of its 2009 Davies Awards, given to organizations that have employed information technology to achieve excellence.
Urban Health Plan implemented its electronic health record in 2006. UHP’s president and CEO, Paloma Hernandez, said it helped transform the healthcare delivery system and help eliminate disparities in the South Bronx and Queens communities it serves.
The same is true in Waco, Texas, said Roland A. Goertz, MD, CEO of Heart of Texas, a community health clinic that grew from one site to 10 after implementing its electronic health record system in 1997.
“The EHR has been a cornerstone of our expansion and quality improvement efforts,” Goertz said.
We know that in one form or another these organizations have the type of partnership between the clinical staff and the IT team that Gerardi and Rothman have. And we expect, though perhaps at a different scale, they also have similar enthusiasm for what they can accomplish together.
It’s remarkable how a little IT coupled with a lot of engagement and ingenuity will go a long way in solving some of our problems.
