LAS VEGAS -- The "long road" toward health IT adoption "has been bumpy, and we still have a long way to go," Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Chair Charlene Underwood said Tuesday at the annual HIMSS Conference in Las Vegas. However, significant progress has been made, Underwood -- senior director of government and industry affairs Siemens Medical Solutions -- said, noting that health care providers already have received $3.1 billion in federal incentive payments for the meaningful use of electronic health records.
Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman told iHealthBeat that he believes the meaningful use incentive program is the most successful federal government program in history. He praised the program for rewarding health care providers for actual use, rather than simply offering upfront funding to purchase EHR systems. The EHR vendor is seeing early results that the program is moving the industry forward, Tullman said.
Survey Finds Progress Being Made, but Barriers Persist
The 2012 HIMSS Leadership Survey found significant progress in meeting meaningful use requirements. The survey -- which was released yesterday at the conference -- polled 302 health IT professionals from December 2011 to January 2012. It found that:
- 26% of health IT professionals said their organization already has attested to Stage 1;
- 4% said they will attest by the end of 2011;
- 27% said they will attest in the first six months of 2012;
- 22% said they will attest in the second six months of 2012; and
- 17% said they plan to wait until 2013.
Only 2% of respondents said their organization was not planning to attest.
According to the survey, the barriers to becoming meaningful users of health IT may be changing.
Jennifer Horowitz -- director of research at HIMSS Analytics -- said it was the first time in the more than 10 years that she's worked on the survey that funding was not the most significant barrier to implementing IT. Instead, lack of staffing resources topped this year's survey, with 21% of respondents citing it as the top barrier.
Kay Hix -- CIO and vice president of Carillon Clinic in Virginia -- explained that hospitals are competing with vendors and consulting firms for health IT employees.
Fourteen percent of respondents said lack of adequate financial support is the top barrier to IT implementation, down from 18% last year, while 12% cited vendors' inability to effectively deliver products or services to respondents' satisfaction.
Competing Priorities
Underwood acknowledged the health care industry is "in a period of great uncertainty, with many competing priorities."
During a media briefing, Dave Roberts, vice president of government relations at HIMSS, said that you can tell from the high attendance -- which as of Tuesday afternoon topped 34,500 registrants -- that "there's a lot of interest in what's going on" in health IT.
Roberts said that the No. 1 thing he has been hearing so far at the conference is attendees' concerns about having to deal with so many competing priorities going on at the same time. He said that HIMSS wants to collect members' concerns and stories and share them with decisionmakers, including the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.
Looking Forward to 2012 Election
Roberts said he believes "health care will be a dominant topic" in the upcoming elections.
He noted that with the Supreme Court determining the fate of the health reform law and ongoing deficit-reduction discussions, health care is poised to be a hot button issue this year.
Roberts said, "Our goal is to try to inform as many people running for office of the value of keeping this topic [of health IT] as a bipartisan" one. In so doing, the organization is working to separate health IT-related issues from health reform, Roberts said, noting that the meaningful use incentive program is unrelated to the more controversial health reform law.
Roberts said, "I think this is going to be a really fascinating time."
Getting Consumers on Board
In a late addition to the HIMSS schedule, Lygeia Ricciardi, senior policy adviser for Consumer eHealth at ONC, told a small crowd that consumer engagement through health IT is "a big deal" because studies show it leads to better care and better health.
Health IT can support consumer engagement by facilitating care coordination, communication with health care providers, and management of health and wellness, Ricciardi said. However, there's a gap between the potential of health IT-supported consumer engagement and today's reality, she explained.
Ricciardi noted that only 8% of consumers have emailed their provider, 10% have a personal health record and 20% have accessed their health information online.
Ricciardi cited several reasons for this gap. For starters, the health care provider community "is not yet there," she said, adding that until there is widespread provider adoption of health IT, consumers won't follow.
In addition, there's a lot of confusion among consumers, Ricciardi said. She noted that 34% of patients don't know if their physician is using an EHR, and many don't know they have a legal right to a copy of their EHR.
To help close the consumer engagement gap, ONC in September 2011 launched the Consumer e-Health Program. ONC's program focuses on the three A's of consumer engagement:
- Access -- Giving consumers secure, timely electronic access to their health information;
- Action -- Supporting the development of tools to help consumers take action using information; and
- Attitude -- Helping expectations about consumer (and provider) roles to evolve.
As part of the program, ONC is asking organizations to pledge to empower patients to become partners in their health through health IT. ONC is accepting two types of pledges:
- 1. Data holders, which pledge to make it easier for individuals to get secure, electronic access to their health information -- and encourage them to do it; and
- 2. Non-data holders, which spread the word about access to information and/or develop tools to make it useful.
So far, more than 250 organizations have taken the pledge, and, collectively, they will provide access to electronic health information to 100 million Americans, or one-third of the U.S. population, Ricciardi said.
She said ONC plans to use surveys to track whether the agency's efforts successfully increase consumer engagement.