MResult Healthcare Insights

Continuing the discussion on social media in Healthcare, this article in BusinessWeek discusses a recent FDA hearing on regulating social media use by drug manufacturers – Why Drug Makers Don’t Twitter. According to the article “Some 60% of Americans say that when they need medical information, they turn to the Internet. At least half the group uses social networks to consult one another on symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments, according to surveys on Web behavior.”

Clearly, if you want to engage your patients in a conversation you need to be doing so online, but many organizations are understandably cautious about liability. We recommend a measured approach;

• Identify an existing community in your hospital (such as a community outreach program, popular class).
• Identify one or more “experts” who can offer insights or commentary in this area (localized content is best!)
• Create a place on your site for your expert to publish. If you’re using a content management system like DotNetNuke you’ll be able to use “out of the box” functionality. If you’re not using a content management system you should be!
• Create a simple approval and review process to ensure the accuracy of any content you produce.

Things have pretty much wound down for the day here at “Corporate HQ” so we’re closing the office to get a jump on holiday travel and turkey wrestling. This has been a great year for the company and we all have very much to be thankful for, most of all (of course) for our clients!

Have a wonderful holiday!

In this Healthcare IT podcast Sue Schade, VP and CIO of Brigham and Women’s and Faulkner’s HospitalsDon’t, discusses Meaningful Use. Her bottom line is that, although the guidelines are not finalized they are close enough and organizations that delay will just fall further behind. She also has some interesting insights for smaller, resource-strapped hospitals.

listen here »

The MGMA recently sent Department of Health and Human Services’ Blumenthal a set of recommendations around how to ensure that compliance with “meaningful use” criteria don’t lead to undue burdens on physician practices. The recommendations are sound and worth reading. It’s not hard to imagine how the cost of compliance could quickly outstrip any savings you might achieve by implementing such a system.

From our standpoint, this underscores the need to really understand how an EMR will help your practice, what areas you wish to automate, where you can realistically expect savings and what your real cost of ownership (database maintenance, hardware, support) are going to be.

Read the letter here ».

At a recent consumer website kickoff meeting we held there was a brief, but spirited conversation between a representative of the senior management team and a representative from marketing. The topic was social media – the relative value of vs. the potential risks. There are valid points on both sides, of course. In our opinion, social media is here to stay, and hospitals are uniquely situated to take advantage of this. Hospitals are places where natural “real life” communities can form – around shared illnesses, around classes and community outreach programs, the list goes on. A social media strategy provides the opportunity to extend these communities in the offline space, and ensure that you keep a communication channel open with current and potential patients.

This article from BNET.com does a good job of summing the position up from an organizational standpoint – Eight Ways to Ruin Your Social-Media Strategy.  Is your hospital doing anything with social media, or do you have plans in the works?

As reported on ModernHealthcare.com, the Obama administration will be looking hard at reducing the number of improper payments made through Medicare and Medicaid – White House puts focus on medicare and medicaid fraud. As the article suggests, weeding out fraud is a major focus of the effort, but the guidelines are certainly confusing enough to admit to a good percentage of honest mistakes. We’ve been looking at this from the standpoint of post care pre-admissions and long term acute care, where adherence to admitting guidelines is particularly important. We believe the combination of sound preadmitting procedures, clearly defined admitting guidelines and software to manage the process is the key to avoiding potentially costly mistakes.

From the New York Times – an article describing a study that compared 3,000 hospitals at various stages in the adoption of computerized health records. The study found little difference in the cost and quality of care after implementing the EMR.

““The way electronic medical records are used now has not yet had a real impact on the quality or cost of health care,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the research project.”

There have been a number of stories on this theme of late, and this is consistent with our experience. EMRs do have great potential for streamlining your operations and improving your care, but not if you think of them as a piece of software. We encourage our clients to view electronic medical records as a process improvement tool. Take the time up front to map out how you want an emr to help you practice medicine, then use that vision to drive your emr selection.

Read the article here (registration may be required)

Our good friends and partners at PatientOS are committed to open source as a part of the overall solution to reining in healthcare costs. Back in October Greg Caulton, one of the principles with PatientOS, had a chance to speak with a group of consular officials from over 20 countries at a meeting of The Center for International Business & Education. You can read about it here.