In what seems like a consistent extension of President-elect Obama’s recent statements on healthcare, Tom Daschle called for a rethinking of the problem, and constructive action to fix it, during a January 8th Senate Hearing.
This AAFP article summarized his statements nicely. As a primary care physician involved in medial IT and EMR’s, it’s difficult to find fault with his ideas:
- Fleshing-out the base of the wellness pyramid: primary care medicine, which is currently the tiny tip of an inverted pyramid
- Incentivizing primary care medicine via reimbursement reform and tuition assistance
- Focusing on outcomes as a basis for Medicare payments, especially improved outcomes at a lower cost
- Making corrective action to fix the system a reality
- Interoperability among EMR’s
From an EMR standpoint, Ideas #3 and #5 are particularly telling.
Idea #3, “better outcomes at a lower cost,” pretty much demands system-wide usage of integrated EMR’s, to track outcomes and costs, and the effectiveness of efforts to optimize them.
Idea #5, the need for interoperability among EMR’s, is hard to argue with from a national policy standpoint, though more problematic to even theoretically attain. Remember Beta vs. VHS? Blu-ray vs. HD?
Yet with the stakes being so incredibly high, if there’s sufficient political will and support to make all EMR vendors talk nice to each other — see Idea #4 — there needn’t be a winnowing of the market. More like the current Blu-ray standard for high definition video discs, and all the major AV companies (Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic, etc.) making players that use that standard.
If every healthcare-related announcement from the new administration progresses “upwards” as they have so far, these next four years should be interesting times, indeed.
