The Opportunity of the Challenge

Challenging times hold great opportunity.

The Health Care Blog has Amanda Goltz’s review of last week’s Institute for Healthcare Improvement‘s National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care.  Among her criticisms is a lack of provider participation in Health 2.0:

The fact that the session billed “Geeky Trends for Experts” is just a basic overview of tools that other industries have been using for a decade tells us something about health care. Patients are the exception here, as they are well-organized on the Web and growing, but as long as hospitals, physician groups, insurers, quality officers and safety improvement organizations remain so behind the curve, patients’ ability to leverage the Internet to manage their health will be limited.

It’s great that one patient with COPD can talk to another about her shared condition, but what about asymmetrical and timely communication with her doctor about a new medication? Or what about instantaneous notification to her case manager’s PDA if she is away from home and goes to the ED? Integration of values collected through her home health monitoring system into her EMR? Daily podcasts on managing fluids?  A “dealing with your HMO” wiki?

I know all of this is in the works, but we need to do more to create physician and hospital leadership in this area (italics mine). “Build it and they will come” will work with patients seeking advice or shared experiences; it won’t work with overworked, overwhelmed physicians or hospital administrators just trying to keep the hospital financially sound, clean, safe, and in line with mandates to report thousands of metrics to CMS, TJC, Leapfrog, etc.

Very. Well. Put.