According to University of Michigan Health Systems, a five-year ongoing study involving 10 large physician practices across the country has so far shown improved quality of care for chronic disease patients from the use of health information technology.

The study named the Medicare Physician Group Practice Demonstration , was launched by the center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to enable physician practices to demonstrate that proactive and coordinated care has the potential for larger revenue savings.  It is a first pay-for-performance project to work directly with physician practices.

Out of ten physician practices, two – Geisinger Clinic and the University of Michigan Famil practice Group – showed improvements in at least 29 of 32 quality measures tracked in the third year of the project.
“We focused on hardwiring reminders and alerts into the electronic health record to enhance care consistency and reliability particularly related to diabetes and coronary care as well as ensuring adults receive preventative health screenings,” said Frederick Bloom, MD, assistant chief qualify officer, Geisinger Health System.
“By participating in this project, we’re able to develop more effective ways of consistently bringing quality and value to all our patients, not just the Medicare beneficiaries who are the focus of the demonstration project,” continued Bloom.

Geisinger Clinic The UM Family Practice group expressed a total in Medicare savings of $2.9 million surpassing the target put down by the CMS. This will be the third year that UM has savings as well as improving care.

We successfully met 100 percent of the quality measures in part through effective use of our sophisticated EHR,” said Ronald Paulus, MD, MBA. “Above all, it was the focused commitment of all Geisinger physicians and staff to delivering quality care and integrating the EHR into all that we do that contributed to our success.”

“Geisinger’s EHR helps our healthcare providers deliver the best and most efficient care since all lab results, notes and studies completed at Geisinger sites are available through the EHR to any provider. This helps decrease repeat testing and improve coordination of care between healthcare providers, no matter where in the system the patient is located.”

Any improvement is a great news.  It however is interesting that we do not know what happened to other 8 clinics.  The success thus is not necessarily indicator of the performance of EHR. It does however can be concluded that EHR was instrumental or catalyst.

Our HIT products – even by admission of leading healthcare professionals – are not upto the mark.  It is better to scrap them and start from scratch said a CEO of the top 10 insurance company.

In fact the mixed success is a direct proof of the lack of quality in EHRs.  It is quite likely that the implementation of EHR brought visibility to these measures and by Demmings principle, any thing that gets measured shows change.

What we need is a group of product development, healthcare delivery, and insurance professionals to join hands and develop a high quality product specifications for a world class EHR and HIT system.

I believe we have the technical competence- what we need to add is the product development and process management competence to create a high quality product.

In addition, we have argued for long time, that we need to develop an integrated health record.  Even today the medical records and personal records are separared.  If we were to agree and there is every reason to do so, the care delivery is not just about symptoms but also of their evolution.  Integration of the two records will give a holistic picture of the care needed.

If one wants to save money in healthcare, focus more on the holistic medicine and ensure that the systems are able to seemlessly handle it.