Industry Watch

Electronic health record (EHR) systems are becoming more common in exam rooms across the U.S., but how is the technology transition being perceived? A survey conducted by GfK Roper for Practice Fusion asked patients about their views on the safety of EHR vs. paper charts, while a separate survey posed the same questions to medical professionals. The results? A majority of physicians reported that EHRs are safer than their paper record counterparts, citing accessibility of data as the top safety benefit.

Enabling patients to see their doctors’ medical notes is a simple yet radical idea that could change the way people engage with their health and healthcare. But will it float?

OpenNotes, a project funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio, is a program that encourages doctors to make their electronic medical notes available to patients. The “Annals of Internal Medicine” has released key findings from a new study about OpenNotes, showing that patients are embracing the use of online access to their medical notes regardless of demographic or health characteristics. For the past year, patients in nine practices in Boston, rural Pennsylvania and Seattle were given access to their medical notes through secure electronic patient portals. Findings show patients are remarkably optimistic and enthusiastic about having online access to this once-secretive medical information. Participating primary care physicians (PCPs) appreciate the potential for sharing notes with patients, but many remain cautious and worry about the impact on their patients and their own workflow.

Key findings:

• Nearly all patients (92 to 97 percent) across the three sites thought open visit notes were a good idea.
• Most (69 to 81 percent) participating PCPs across the three sites thought open visit notes were a good idea, compared with only 16 to 33 percent of doctors who declined participation.
• More than one-half of participating doctors (50 to 58 percent) and most nonparticipating doctors (88 to 92 percent) expected that open visit notes would result in greater worry among patients. In striking contrast, far fewer patients concurred (12 to 16 percent).

The next step is to examine what difference the information access has made in the way patients have engaged with their health and how healthcare is delivered. The research also aims to measure how perceptions for both doctors and patients have changed regarding the benefits and risks of open notes and help identify what steps are needed to overcome doctors’ concerns.

Find out more about OpenNotes and read the Dec. 20, 2011, “Annals of Internal Medicine” study here.

“Preparing for a HIPAA Security Compliance Assessment,” by William Miaoulis, CISA, CISM, is a must-have resource for health information management (HIM) and information technology (IT) professionals who manage HIPAA security requests for their facilities – and for enhancing learning in HIM education programs. The volume contains step-by-step information to create a HIPAA-compliant policy to further security and privacy. Also featured are: tools, sample policies and checklists to provide samples of assessment needs; analysis of federal and state laws, regulations and guidelines; and tools to analyze information security and risk assessment.

This book is available through the AHIMA Web store: www.ahimastore.org.

An internationally known health information technology (IT) leader and a top nonprofit health IT organization are collaborating with the Georgia Institute of Technology on a new public-private initiative designed to accelerate the use of health IT to benefit patients and providers – as well as improve personal and population health.

Open Health Tools, Inc., is a multi-stakeholder open-source community in which member organizations collaborate to create the shared platforms and tools necessary to build affordable and easy-to-use interoperable health IT solutions. Joining the effort as its senior strategic advisor is Robert M. Kolodner, M.D., who is chief health informatics officer for Open Health Tools and former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The new initiative will include participants from government, healthcare providers and provider organizations, patient and personal health advocacy organizations, open-source and commercial vendors, public health organizations, academic and non-academic researchers, start-up companies and entrepreneurs. Kolodner will serve in a planning and participant coordination role, making use of his 30-plus years of experience in health IT.

Learn more at www.openhealthtools.org.

In an effort to uncover the biggest trends and challenges facing primary care physicians (PCPs) today, Epocrates Market Research recently conducted its annual survey of PCPs to uncover their perspectives on a range of issues related to practicing medicine, healthcare technology usage/adoption and more. The study included 632 PCPs who use Epocrates software. More than 1.4 million healthcare professionals, including 50 percent of U.S. physicians, use Epocrates drug reference, educational and clinical apps. Highlights from the survey findings include:

Tablet adoption is on the rise. Twenty percent of primary care physicians surveyed currently use a tablet, with nearly 45 percent planning to purchase a tablet within the next year.

New forms of physician/patient interaction are emerging. Almost 54 percent of PCPs currently use or plan to implement e-mail within the next year as a form of communication with patients, while nearly 48 percent currently use or plan to implement a patient portal, 21 percent currently use or plan to implement text messaging and 10 percent currently use or plan to implement video chat.

Meaningful use becomes an important initiative for physicians. More than half of PCPs feel confident that they will meet meaningful-use requirements by the deadline. Sixty-five percent already have an EHR system that will allow them to meet meaningful-use standards, indicating a 10 percent increase from 2010. Among those who do not currently have an EHR system, nearly 36 percent plan to implement one this year.

Reimbursements, work/life balance and patient time are biggest challenges. When asked about the greatest challenges in their practices, almost 57 percent of PCPs reported that lower reimbursements are their biggest challenge, followed closely by the lack of work/life balance (52 percent) and the lack of adequate time with patients (52 percent).

Medicaid expansion is a hurdle for docs. Almost 70 percent of PCPs do not feel prepared, or are unsure whether they are prepared, to handle the influx of insured patients from the expansion of Medicaid.

Sanjay Gupta is the most credible TV doc. When asked which physician news correspondents on national TV are most credible, Dr. Sanjay Gupta from CNN ranked at the top, followed in order by Dr. Nancy Snyderman (NBC), Dr. Richard Besser (ABC), Dr. Jennifer Ashton (CBS) and Dr. Manny Alvarez (FOX).

Research results released in November 2011 show that many companies are failing to maximize the efficiency with which they extract useful business intelligence from archived e-mail. While a majority of businesses value this information – including for analysis of communication trends and response times to customer queries, storage capacity monitoring and data leakage protection – many are using only the most basic tools to archive their e-mail.

The independent blind survey of 200 IT decision makers in U.S. organizations was conducted by Opinion Matters on behalf of GFI Software. It reveals how organizations retain and reuse e-mail data, what solutions they have in place for doing this, what value they place on e-mail data and how frequently the IT department is called upon to assist in the recovery of e-mail from archives to support employees.

Key highlights from the survey include:

•    Sixty-nine percent of respondents indicate that employee requests for assistance retrieving deleted e-mails limit IT staff productivity.
•    On average, respondents say they receive more than 15 requests per week from users who need access to old or archived e-mail, while one in four (26 percent) of those surveyed field 18 requests or more per week.
•    Forty-five percent of those surveyed have no IT solution for managing and automating e-mail archive retention and retrieval.
•    Nineteen percent say the information contained within their archived e-mail is “priceless” to the organization, while three-quarters (75 percent) value their organization’s archived e-mail data at more than $100,000.
•    Twenty-four percent of respondents do not believe they are storing their e-mail in the most cost-effective way, and one-quarter (25 percent) do not know if their current process is cost effective.

“This research shows how e-mail retention forms part of the overall business intelligence strategy and how, with the right tools, an existing asset like e-mail data can deliver long-term value to organizations of all sizes,” says Brian Azzopardi, MailArchiver product manager at GFI Software.

Learn more about e-mail management solutions at www.gfi.com.

New research released in November 2011 by MIT Sloan Management Review and the IBM Institute for Business Value reports that organizational challenges, more so than technology hurdles, are holding companies back from fully integrating analytics across their enterprises.

According to a global survey of more than 4,500 executives, managers and analysts from more than 120 countries and 30 industries, 44 percent of organizations say cultural barriers to enterprise-wide analytics adoption, such as the requirement for new leadership competencies and organizational resistance to new ideas, are the primary barriers. In contrast, only 24 percent point to technology concerns.

The report, entitled “Analytics: The Widening Divide,” builds on the findings from the original study by MIT SMR and IBM in 2010 to understand how companies are embedding analytics in more of the enterprise’s processes and operations.

To access the full report, visit www.mitsmr.com/DataReport11.