Most of you have probably already seen the topline results from CHIME’s “Healthcare’s Most Wired: National Trends 2018” study, which was released last month.
Some of the more interesting numbers coming out of the survey, at least for me, included the following:
- Just 60% of responding physicians could access a hospital network’s virtual patient visit technology from outside its network, which kinda defeats the purpose of decentralizing care delivery.
- The number of clinical alerts sent from a surveillance system integrated with an EHR topped out at 58% (alerts to critical care units), with 35% of respondents reporting that they had no surveillance system in place. This seems like quite a lost opportunity.
- Virtually all (94%) participating organizations said that their organization’s EHR could consume discrete data, and 64% said they could incorporate CCDs and CCRs from physician-office EHRs as discrete data.
What really stands out for me, though, is that if CHIME’s overall analysis is correct, many aspects of our data analytics and patient engagement progress still hang in the balance.
Perhaps by design, the hospital industry comes out looking like it’s doing well in most of the technology strategy areas that it has questions about in the survey, but leaves out some important areas of weakness.
Specifically, in the introduction to its survey report, the group lists “integration and interoperability” as one of two groups of foundational technologies that must be in place before population health management/value-based care, patient engagement and telehealth programs can proceed.
If that’s true, and it probably is, it throws up a red flag, which is probably why the report glossed over the fact that overall interoperability between hospitals is still very much in question. (If nothing else, it’s high time the hospitals adjust their interoperability expectations.) While it did cite numbers regarding what can be done with CCDs, it didn’t address the much bigger problems the industry faces in sharing data more fluidly.
Look, I don’t mean to be too literal here. Even if CHIME didn’t say so specifically, hospitals and health systems can make some progress on population health, patient engagement, and telehealth strategies even if they’re forced to stick to using their own internal data. Failing to establish fluid health data sharing between facility A and facility B may lead to less-than-ideal results, but it doesn’t stop either of them from marching towards goals like PHM or value-based care individually.
On the other hand, there certainly is an extent to which a lack of interoperability drags down the quality of our results. Perhaps the data sets we have are good enough even if they’re incomplete, but I think we’ve already got a pretty good sense that no amount of CCD exchange will get the results we ultimately hope to see. In other words, I’m suggesting that we take the CHIME survey’s data points in context.
