The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009, a $19 billion portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), has put electronic medical records (EMRs) at the forefront of the current effort to improve our nation’s healthcare system and curb rising health costs.  That $19 billion was allocated specifically to help doctors and hospitals overcome financial barriers to EMR adoption thus prompting nationwide implementation.

Yet as time and data have demonstrated, simply acquiring EMR technology is not a silver bullet to cutting costs, improving quality, or achieving compliance with the moving target of “meaningful use” – the currently undefined requirement that must be satisfied to take advantage of HITECH funding incentives.

Dr. Karen Bell, a health technology expert and former senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services makes a compelling point in this New York Times article examining the results, or rather lack of results, achieved thus far through EMR adoption. “Better information at the point of care” will be the real tipping point towards improved healthcare, she says.

I agree. The better the information hospitals and clinicians are able to access at the point of care, the more efficient and cost-effective care they will be able to deliver.  But we must also be able to tap into that data to achieve true “meaningful use.”  Even a 100% conversion to electronic medical records is useless to improving our care delivery system overall if those records aren’t fed the best information and aren’t fed into an information exchange infrastructure allowing valuable insight into the needs of patients and clinicians.

Philips, with both our patient monitoring and health informatics offerings, is already collecting the most robust data at the point of care and utilizing that information to save lives.  For example, bedside clinical decision support systems like ProtocolWatch are improving clinician compliance with evidence-based medical guidelines, leading to earlier intervention and better patient care.  (Learn more about ProtocolWatch here). 

Fed directly into a nationwide healthcare information exchange infrastructure, this data could be used to inform meaningful innovations in care leading to improvements we can’t even imagine now. 

Unfortunately, our healthcare system simply isn’t programmed to enable these insights on a nationwide basis today – and an all-out conversion to EMRs won’t change that. But true meaningful use is close at hand; in fact it is right at the point of care. Let’s make sure we use it.

Eric