Health IT

We asked Paul DeMuro, a prominent health care attorney at Latham & Watkins, who has extensive experience with various approaches to creating integrated systems, to reflect on some of what lies ahead for providers in an environment that he says "is fundamentally changing."

Although the new health care reform law likely will be subject to many legal challenges and the rhetoric will fly, providers now must assess how they will prepare for another 35 million or so people covered by some form of health care insurance. Some expect this to be a windfall for hospitals, physicians, managed care organizations and pharmaceutical companies as all these people seek access to care. However, it will not be “business as usual,” with more patients and more reimbursement. The system is fundamentally changing.

Denmark may have lost the title of "happiest place on earth" to Costa Rica, but it still has health IT.

The Danish have, according to several studies, the most efficient health information system in the world. All primary care physicians and almost half of the hospitals utilize electronic records, in comparison to just 10 percent of hospitals and 17 percent of physicians here. The Danish information system saves doctors about 50 minutes a day in administrative work, and a 2008 report from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society estimates that the electronic records system saves Denmark $120 million annually.

Ebben Harrell of TIME provides a nice summary of the savvy and centralized Danish system:

Longtime readers of the New Health Dialogue will tire of another post from me about CT scans. But in keeping with our commitment to review and comment on the news, I press on like Ponce de Leon!

As we get closer to passage of health reform in Congress, Dr. David Blumenthal, the national health information technology coordinator, challenged us to recall that the Obama administration has already passed historic health legislation.

"In a health-care debate characterized by partisan bickering," Alexi Mostrous of the Washington Post writes, "most lawmakers agree on one thing: American medicine needs to go digital." But how how we make sure it goes digital -- evenly? In other words, how can we use technology to eliminate health disparities -- not enlarge them?

Remember that funding for health information technology in the stimulus package? We know, it's been a little while, and when it comes to health reform, we've had a lot on our minds lately.

Grand Junction, CO, is the high-quality, low-cost flip side of McAllen, Texas in Atul Gawande's recent New Yorker article.

Long before the federal government began its big push to reform the U.S. health care system, states were feeling the strain of rising health care costs and increasing numbers of uninsured. Many states decided to take a crack at health reform in their own way.

The story we are about to tell you is probably not what automatically comes to mind when you hear "safety-net hospital."

On Monday, we continued our series of posts on the Health CEOs for Health Reform by looking at how more integrated models of care can deliver higher quality at lower costs.

Today, we'll see how Denver Health -- an urban safety net institution for Denver and the Rocky Mountain Region -- has established a highly integrated system that consistently delivers high-value care to vulnerable population. Health IT and electronic medical records are key to their success, as Patricia Gabow, MD, Denver Health's CEO explains in the video below:

I keep reading and hearing and sometimes even writing about doctors who let patients make appointments online or request prescription refills online. As a full time working mom, I am a big fan of online convenience, online shopping, online communication, anything that keeps me off of "hold."