By Mike Miliard, Managing Editor
Each year, there are more and more encouraging stories of providers adopting and implementing healthcare IT. This past year was no different, says David Collins, HIMSS’s director of Health Information Systems.
“One that’s certainly very successful is Urban Health Plan out of the Bronx,” Collins said. “What’s so interesting about them is, one, the population they serve is the lowest income in the country, and, two, they’ve been through an implementation that was not successful, initially.” But from that implementation, he said, “they learned a tremendous amount about how to customize their workflow for their particular needs, and they drove their vendors forward to make their vendors work for them. I think that’s such an invaluable lesson right now. With all this money being poured into health IT, it’s got to be done right. You can’t just flip it on and hope for the best. You’ve got to be thoughtful.”
“MultiCare Health System in Tacoma, Washington is really interesting as well,” he said. “Multicare again really exemplifies excellence with workflow and understanding their process. And they have taken a hard look at their quality metrics, and they share these metrics internally and externally, which is really unusual. Internally, of course, they have dashboards at any hospital. But they actually have graphs and measures and metrics posted on their public Web site so patients can go there and see trends. That’s impressive. That’s noteworthy for a system to feel that confident in what they’re doing: ‘We’re providing better quality care, and we can show you!’”
MultiCare and Urban Health are both Davies Award winners, but Collins said that there were many impressive successes in 2009 that are equally deserving of praise. Among them, he cites providers such as Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, Mercy Heart Hospital in Des Moines, Iowa; and Advocate Healthcare in Chicago as leaders in their usage of everything from EHRs and CPOEs to data mining and RFIDs.
Much has changed in the past decade. So, 10 years being a nice round number, perfect for retrospection and self-reflection, I asked Collins how the current moment for healthcare IT looks from his vantage point. “Better than it’s ever been before,” he said.