[MUSIC] Hi, this is Bruce Darrow and I'm going to be talking about why health information technology is important now. Some of the drivers for increasing use of information technology in healthcare. So, we can look at the drivers of health IT from three different perspectives. First from the perspective of what patients need technology to provide them. Second, from what clinicians, doctors, nurses, and other clinicians need IT to provide for them. And third, from what either the payers, insurance companies, Medicare, Medicaid or regulators would need to get out of health information technology. So, from the perspective of the patient, some of the things that a patient wants is, first of all, they want easy access to health information. If something was prescribed, or something was recommended from a doctor's office, they want to be able to get that. They want to be able to get information about whatever healthcare issues they have, and they want to be able to get it wherever they are, whenever they are, and to whatever device they're using. Second of all, they'd like to have easy access to their clinician. Smartphones are pretty ubiquitous at this point, and email is a 20-plus year-old technology, so the ability of people to be in touch with other people is commonplace and expected. And patients today want to know that they can use these modes of communication that they use throughout the rest of their lives to speak with doctors and other people important to their healthcare. Third of all, they want clinicians to be able to share information with one another. If a patient goes to see a specialist for an opinion, they want that specialist to be communicating back to their primary doctor, or to another specialist. If the patient is in the hospital, they want their office-based physician to be able to know what happened out there. If the patient goes to the hospital, they want their hospital to know what happened in the patient's private office. So, those are things that are both, all facilitated by the use of technology. Number four, patients want their healthcare to be as easy as other things in their life. So patients today, when they use their technology to do other things, they can call a cab, they can schedule movie tickets or theater tickets. They can make airplane tickets. They can schedule a reservation to eat at a restaurant. They can do all sorts of things with technology. And they see no reason why they shouldn't be able to apply those same techniques to the healthcare world. And then lastly, some patients want to be smart customers. They want to be able to use their technology to find out more about their health conditions, more about the ways that their medications might cause side effects or interact with one another. Things that they're doing, they want to know if their doctor is a good doctor. They want to know if the doctor across town is a better doctor. They want to know if this doctor has been well-regarded by other patients. They want to be able to use those tools, and those are all things that technology helps foster. From the perspective of a clinician, here are some of the things that clinicians, doctors, nurses and others will use technology to do. First of all, they want their patients to be informed and happy. A lot of the things that frustrate patients about healthcare have to do with technology. It's hard to schedule an appointment. It's hard to get in touch with my doctor. It's hard to get my records. It's hard to make sure that my records get from point A to point B. This bothers the clinician to the same extent that it bothers a patient. And so, because clinicians want their patients to be happy, they want the technology to be able to support that. Second of all, they want to use technology to make their practices work better. If that means more efficient, if it means being able to access records from home, being able to work from home, being able to check on their phone for results of blood tests, other tests. They want their practice to work and use the efficiencies that technology brings by getting away from the pen and paper world. Number three, they want to be able to coordinate care easily with other clinicians. If there are three people taking care of one patient, they don't want to all be ordering the same blood test. They want to be able to coordinate by communicating with one another, deciding who will be doing what interventions and then sharing the information across all of them in a way that technology really helps facilitate. Number four, they want to meet the expectations of their patients. Today, clinicians realize that the world of health IT is sadly behind those other industries that I mentioned earlier. And the patients who are finding it so easy to be able to order wine online, or get seats at a restaurant, wonder why they can't have the same ease in going to their doctor's office or getting their information there. And lastly, there are increasing requirements of what the payers and regulators need to be able to make sure that healthcare is safe. And I'll talk about what their goals are in the next slide, but from the perspective of the clinician, if they are not meeting the technology expectations of payers and regulators, they may face financial penalties. Lastly, the drivers of health information technology from the payer and regulator side include, one, they need to measure clinician effectiveness. It is important for an insurance company to know that their doctors are giving their patients good care. And in order to know that they're giving good care, they need to, where possible, measure the effectiveness of their care. That can only be done through the use of technology, because otherwise, it's hard to collect information in a central place from all of your different clinicians. Second of all, they want to ensure patient safety. One of other things that health information technology allows you to do is to see things like, do I have patients that my clinicians in my insurance panel are putting on inappropriate medications? Are they sending them for inappropriate tests? Am I working with a surgeon that has a much higher complication rate than his or her peers? These are things where the payers and regulators, if they have the right information, they can ensure better care and better safety for their patients. And then lastly, they want to ensure value and identify variation. If there are two doctors who see patients with back pain, and one doctor orders MRI tests on 5 out of every 100 patients, and one orders 50 out of every 100 patients, which one is right? Maybe the one who orders 50 is right, and the one who is ordering 5 is ordering fewer than he or she should. Maybe the one who is ordering 5 per 100 has just as good satisfaction in terms of patient outcomes and pain management. And just as good outcomes in terms of need for surgery or overall life expectancy as the one who orders 50. In that case, there might be 45 per 100 more MRI tests than are necessary. Perhaps the outcomes are the same, in which case the person who is ordering more MRIs is doing so at a higher cost for their patients and for the system than the one who is only ordering five. The only way to find that variation is to be able to collect the information. So, these are all drivers of health information technology from different perspectives in the healthcare system. [MUSIC]
