Summary
The real value of getting everybody on an electronic medical record in the next decade will not be realized until the data produced through this transition become easily accessible and analyzable to identify, implement and continuously improve best practices. More than three quarters of 732 surveyed executives at provider, payer and pharmaceutical organizations believ e this secondary use of data from electronic records will be their organizations' greatest asset during the next five years.
Analysis
Regardless of the fate of health care reform, the Obama Administration let the real genie out of the bottle on February 17, 2009 with the passage of the economic stimulus law and its $36 billion in federal government incentives to create a vast national electronic health record network. Anyone that has read the HITECH portion of this law (Public Law 111-5) and followed the work of the Health IT Policy and Standards Committee over the past six months knows that the public and private purchasers of health care in the next decade will expect their health plans, hospitals and physicians to use certified electronic records which permit their meaningful users to satisfy all quality reporting and ultimately clinical outcome improvement expectations.
Increasingly, being able to access, analyze and use the electronic data produced by use of these records to evaluate and continuously improve care through the following of practices associated with better severity of illness adjusted outcomes will become standard operating procedure at all clinically and financially successful institutions. Of course, if the various provisions seeking to accelerate this process found in various parts of the five versions of health care reform legislation (especially those in the Senate Finance Committee which the President is using as a template for the final bill at least right now) survive in the final legislative package signed into law by the end of the year, then the demands to use this electronic data in this manner will be that much greater.
Companies poised to benefit from using electronic medical data to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of care in the next decade include:
1. General Electric;
2. McKessson;
3. Siemens;
4. IBM;
5. Accenture;
6. CSC;
7. Hewlett Packard;
8. Premier, Inc.
9. Dell; and
10. Medco.
This author consults with leading institutions through GLG
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
