• Industry Watch •
FDA Proposes Drug Effects Monitoring System
Federal health officials have announced plans for a new monitoring system known as the Sentinel Initiative, which is intended to allow Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials to monitor the effects of drugs currently on the market. The computer tracking system would work by enabling the FDA to search claims data from private insurers, hospitals, and the database for Medicare’s health insurance plan for the elderly and disabled. In fact, the FDA plans to look at information from more than 25 million patients with prescription drug coverage under Medicare. Some healthcare analysts and consumer groups welcome the change from the current monitoring system and have expectations of finding useful information for Medicare patients within a year. Federal health officials made assurances that the FDA and other researchers would not have access to the personal information of Medicare beneficiaries. The current process of reporting is voluntary where physicians, patients and manufacturers report problems with drugs and medical devices that they deem are necessary. To assess the accuracy of the Sentinel system the FDA will conduct studies on well-known drug side effects.
IBM SOA Collaborations
In an effort to promote as well as to facilitate the spread of service oriented architecture (SOA) in healthcare, IBM recently announced a collaboration with nine business partners working to develop their latest healthcare applications using the IBM SOA Foundation and supporting a set of open technology and industry standards. In an SOA, software components can be exposed as services on the network, and can be continually re-used for different applications and purposes.
The nine partners provide applications that encompass many of the specialty fields that impact the healthcare industry including electronic health records, clinical portals, document management, health analytics, consent management, health enterprise management, communications, and clinical and financial information management. The companies, in order of the coinciding list of specialty, include Blueware, Carefx, CGI Solutions and Technologies, Ricoh, Convergence CT, HIPAAT, Lawson, Nortel and Siemens Medical Solutions.
IBM’s SOA strategy incorporates aspects of several industry-leading product portfolios including WebSphere, Lotus, Tivoli, Rational and Information Management and is a critical component of IBM’s Information on Demand initiative. These portfolios have been further strengthened by a series of key acquisitions such as Cognos, ISS and Watchfire. IBM has more than 5,700 SOA engagements and a community of more than 4,200 SOA Business Partners worldwide.
U.S. Ads Promote Hospital Comparison/Shopping
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently launched a national advertising campaign in 58 major daily newspapers to promote the Hospital Compare Web site. The Web site allows users to compare the quality of care provided in nearly 4,000 hospitals across the nation while the newspaper ad is aimed at reaching areas covered by roughly 1,000 of these hospitals. The ads contain two of the 26 quality and patient satisfaction measures taken from the Hospital Compare scores in order to provide a sample of hospitals in each newspaper’s market. The 26 quality measures are designed to provide patients with a better understanding of 10 key aspects of the patient experience and get a better picture of the quality of care delivered at their local hospitals.
The information is collected through a new patient survey, the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey — the first national, standardized, publicly-reported survey of patients’ perspectives of care.
The two measures chosen for inclusion in the ad are an HCAHPS score for the percentage of patients who said they always received help when they requested it, and a score for the percentage of patients given antibiotics one hour before surgery.
Hospital Compare was created by CMS in collaboration with the Hospital Quality Alliance, a private/public partnership that includes the American Hospital Association, the Federation of American Hospitals, the Association of American Medical Colleges, AARP and the AFL-CIO. Other major medical associations, governmental organizations, consumer and business groups as well as measurement and accrediting bodies also support Hospital Compare.
Go to www.HospitalCompare.HHS.gov to access the Hospital Compare Web site.