Information Technology

However, the capabilities of today’s IT infrastructure fall well short of that needed to truly support value-based care. Consensus among IT suppliers, providers, payers, and policymakers is urgently needed to reap the potential of IT and powerful benefits for value. To date, health IT has been siloed in its functions, services, and interoperability. Today’s IT systems reflect the fragmented legacy structure of care delivery in general, as well limits of IT capabilities.
The Valued-Based Health Care IT Agenda
The following improvements will help providers and other players in the health care system leverage information technology to help them achieve two key aims: restructuring care delivery and measuring results.
- Establish common data definitions and precise language definitions to improve reporting capability and effective outcomes measurement.
- Combine all types of data (e.g. notes, images) for each patient.
- Aggregate data that encompasses the full care cycle for a given medical condition and/or patient, including care by referring entities.
- Allow access and communication among all involved parties, including with patients.
- Create standardized templates for medical conditions to improve usability and highlight the information most pertinent to management of a specific condition.
- Collect structured data, rather than free text, in patient records.
- Allow easy extraction of outcome measures, process measures, and activity-based costing measures for each patient and medical condition.
- Adopt interoperability standards enabling communication among different provider and payer organizations as part of a larger restructuring effort; eliminate expensive middleware.
Overall, per capita investment in health IT has also lagged behind other industries. Although recent emphasis on “meaningful use” of IT has expanded the health IT industry, its functionality has been limited to being excellent revenue cycle tools in a fee-for-service based delivery system. The transformation to a VBHC system will require support of condition-based care through data sharing, outcomes and cost measurement and reporting enabled by information technology, and technical support of new value-based payment methods.
Value-enhancing IT platforms have six key elements, which are outlined and described in the table below:
Value-enhancing elements of IT Systems | Description |
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1. Centered on patients |
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2. Uses common data definitions |
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3. Encompasses all types of patient data |
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4. Allows access and communication amongst all stakeholders involved in care |
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5. Includes templates and expert systems for each medical condition |
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6. Makes it easy to extract and report information |
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Providers, IT vendors, policy makers, and payers will need to coordinate and integrate efforts to accelerate value-added deployment of IT in health care. IT is an essential tool to enable a VBHC system but is not itself a solution to low-value care. Government can have a major impact on stimulating health information technology innovation that will finally achieve the potential of enabling significant improvement of value for patients. Better, interoperable IT systems that support value-based care will enable dramatic improvements in patient outcomes and efficiency, and end an era where health IT has entrenched the status quo, perpetuated silo’s and blocked reimbursement reform.
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