Naturally, most of what you hear from healthcare IT companies about their products is going to be upbeat, designed to create a sense of potential and promise. I mean, I can easily extol the virtues of the company I lead and the products and services we sell.
Mathematically, the gap between $3.6 million and $17,000 is a chasm.
This is something you know well if you’re Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, which paid the latter number to unlock patient data held hostage by malicious hackers using ransomware when the former number is what the hackers initially asked for.
For behavioral health hospitals that don’t yet have an EHR and think they can’t afford one without financial assistance, the wait for federal government support continues.
In a world where only the wealthy suffered from addiction, we wouldn’t have to worry so much about the effectiveness of treatment or who was going to pay for it.
But most people don’t live in Malibu or have access to Betty Ford, so efficacy matters.
Especially to insurance organizations, including the federal government, which have become increasingly more hesitant in recent years to pay for inpatient addiction treatment when it seems no one can demonstrate what actually works.
Imagine you’re living in Brooklyn and you have a medical emergency. If the hospital nearest you, say Lutheran Medical Center, were to close, you could go to Maimonides or New York Methodist a short taxi or ambulance ride away.
Not that long ago, healthcare worried mostly about the physical loss of personal health information (PHI) by way of a lost thumb drive, a stolen laptop, some misplaced paper files. These were the primary concerns in HIMSS initial security survey, published in 2008. It wasn’t until five years later, in 2013, that the largest healthcare security breaches came from cyberattacks instead of lost or stolen devices.
One requirement of the 2014 Final Rule on Health Information Technology is for pricing transparency and disclosure. Certified electronic health record (EHR) vendors have been required to disclose any “additional types of cost that an EP (eligible provider), EH (eligible hospital) or CAH (critical access hospital) would pay to implement the Complete EHR’s or EHR Module’s capabilities in order to attempt to meet meaningful use objectives and measures.”
In January of this year, political analyst Norman Ornstein lost his 34-year-old son, Matthew, to accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. While Matthew’s death was a tragic blow to family and friends, it was not the kind of out-of-the-blue shock that comes with absolutely no forewarning.
On the face of it, the use of computers to order prescriptions seems like a no-brainer. Who, after all, is capable of reading a physician’s handwriting?
But if we set aside clichés, there is still this question: Does e-prescribing provide distinct benefits over handwritten patient prescriptions? With acknowledgement of some drawbacks, it would seem the scales tip decidedly toward e-prescribing as a net positive.
Any conversation focused on what’s great about America usually includes a mention of optimism, hopefulness or some variation on the theme.
Americans generally still believe in a brighter future, and especially the ways in which technology can enable that future. But that sense of optimism contains a kernel of potential disappointment when we ask technology to do too much.
Consider the case of mental health care, a profession that faces significant budget shortfalls.
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