I recently attended the annual Health Information Management System Society (HIMSS) conference in Las Vegas with the objective to understand more about the future direction of Healthcare Information Exchange.
Vegas is an interesting city and I am sure you have all seen pictures of the neon lights on the 7km “Strip” or Las Vegas Boulevard. The city leapt to fame in 1947 with the establishment of luxury casinos which the American gangsters used as a mechanism to launder their illegal gains. This all seems to have changed and today Las Vegas thrives from tourists who visit to see the big celebrity shows, designer label shopping and gambling. The gambling is “in your face”. When entering any hotel lobby you will only find the hotel reception after you have passed an extensive number of gambling tables and slot machines. Many hotels have shopping centres attached and you will have had to win at the tables to afford to buy anything there! The other thing that struck me was smoking was allowed everywhere.
The HIMSS conference was held in the Venice hotel and casino where you can enjoy a gondola ride with a singing gondolier! 35,000 delegates attended and could choose from a list of 20 concurrent 1 hour long lectures between 08:00 and 17:00 for 5 days. There were 1,000 exhibitors promoting their healthcare information technology related goods and services in the exhibition halls over 2 floors of the conference centre.
In the USA the adoption of electronic health records (eHR ) is promoted by the Obama government and healthcare facilities that achieve certification for utilizing eHR’s are (generously) financially compensated. As a result the uptake has been very good and most healthcare facilities utilize eHR’s to some extent. The next step in the Obama government eHR plan is to share the patient’s eHR’s across healthcare facilities over the entire USA.
Healthcare organizations use whatever means they can to retain their patients and there appears to be a reluctance to provide competing healthcare organizations with access to the patients’ healthcare records. This keeps the patients within their care facilities. This behaviour has hampered progress with sharing eHR’s, but in a couple of counties, some progress has been made in this regard. An area of eHR where there is no consensus is related to where the patients’ eHR is stored and how it is accessed. There are two major views, one is that the various healthcare facilities where the patient is treated should hold their own eHR for the patient and a central index is used to access this eHR and the second is that all eHR’s are stored on a regional health information system. Both approaches have their merits and both raises concerns related to the security of the data.
I find this topic very interesting and I look forward to the development of eHR’s in South Africa.
Regards
- Peter Kennedy
