Health IT Leaders Launch Info-Sharing Website

17 Leading EHR Vendors

A group of physician health IT leaders has launched a nonprofit website for doctors that's designed to promote the transformation of healthcare through the use of information technology. Although not directly aligned with the federal government's Meaningful Use program, the website, Doctors Helping Doctors Transform Health Care also could help physicians achieve Meaningful Use by aiding them in implementing electronic health records.

Founding board members of the venture include William Bria, MD, chief medical information officer, the Shriners Hospitals for Children, and president, Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS); Peter Basch, MD, an internist with Washington Primary Care Physicians, and medical director, ambulatory EHR and health IT policy, Medstar Health; and Michael Zaroukian, MD, PhD, chief medical information officer and professor of medicine, Michigan State University, and medical director, clinical informatics and care transformation, Sparrow Health System. Janet Marchibroda, chair of the Health IT Initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center, will serve as executive director.

Funding is coming from the Chan Soon-Shiang Family Foundation, the Optum Institute for Sustainable Health, and Siemens Healthcare. Medical organizations collaborating with the venture include AMDIS, the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Physicians, the American Osteopathic Association, and the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The American Association of Family Physicians and the AMA will play advisory roles, according to a press release.

[ Electronic health records are the wave of the near future. See EHR Adoption To Reach 80% By 2016. ]

The site's main goal, said Bria in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare, is to start a grassroots physician-to-physician "adoption of information technology in the service of patient care."

Noting that physicians have always learned from each other to improve their practice of medicine, he said that collegial aid and support have been insufficiently emphasized in the health IT field.

Bria said he hoped physicians would use the site to share inspirational stories, talk about how health IT affects front-line medicine, "and help one another make this transformation effectively."

Although additional resources are available from organizations such as AMDIS and HIMSS, Bria said, a goal of the site is to get doctors to trade ideas about their problems and solutions in implementing EHRs and using the exchange to improve care--a process that should provide valuable feedback to vendors.

In the process, the site might help some clinicians overcome their resistance to Meaningful Use criteria. But Bria pointed out that the government program is related to financial incentives and "is not the whole transformation. If you make this transition properly and you end up realizing the benefits of having these tools on the front line of patient care, that's vastly more important than getting every dollar that's been appropriated for Meaningful Use."

Similarly, Basch observed that much of the current activity motivated by the Meaningful Use program is "a compliance exercise" to get the government incentives and avoid the penalties. "We want to bring back the higher mission of why this is being done," he told InformationWeek Healthcare. "We want to remind people that the higher purpose of this is to make care better, more affordable and more accessible. It's not about compliance."

At the same time, Basch said, he and his colleagues hope that the discussions on the community site will be "practical and focused. We hope to get veterans talking about their experiences and newcomers talking about challenges. Sometimes the most thoughtful comments come from people who are new to health IT and aren't as forgiving of workarounds as some of us old-timers are."

Besides EHR implementation, he added, the site will address issues such as the challenges of using health IT to improve care coordination and the reasons why so many doctors still are not doing data entry in their EHRs.

"We're not looking for rants. We're looking for people who can point out realistically and constructively to their colleagues the pathways that seem to make sense and those that are troublesome. 'Here's what I've tried that might help.'"

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