Neupert On Health : health data

A New Place for Health Care Policy Debate

pnblog — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:34:00 GMT

About a month or so ago, the Washington Post launched their new Health Care Rx blog, and I was asked to participate as a panelist. Every Monday, questions are sent out, and a variety of “experts” from across the health care industry respond. It provides a great snapshot of the many different perspectives that exist.

This week’s question:

The Blue Dog Coalition worries the health bill in the House does not address fundamental cost drivers in the system. Is it possible to rein in costs in the current system? How?

My response is now live: It's Not About Costs, It's About Enabling Transformation

My main points -- real change requires:

Figuring out what works (and what doesn't)
Enabling supply-side innovation
Letting consumers do some of the work that expensive health-care professionals shouldn't be doing anymore

To read the full post, click here. Please feel free to comment with your own thoughts on how to rein in costs in the current health care system.

And you can see my responses to previous questions:

Who Pays for Whose Heath Care? [Posted July 14]

The political debate is often framed around covering the uninsured. At the heart of this is the supposition that health care is a moral obligation -- that everyone has a "right" to it. But it's difficult to separate the moral from the economic because there is no other "liberty" that requires payment.

Defusing the Health Care Bomb [Posted June 16]

The "big red wire" that needs to be clipped first is the fee-for-service payment system driven by the government today through Medicare reimbursement decisions. Until that's addressed, the ticking bomb won't be stopped.

Diagnosing and Treating the Health Non-System [Posted June 7]

We do not currently have a health system at all: it is a health non-system.

If you want to follow the conversation, you can add the Health Care Rx blog to your RSS reader here: http://views.washingtonpost.com/healthcarerx/atom.xml, and I will be posting summaries of my responses on this blog.

Another milestone on the journey forward…

pnblog — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:43:00 GMT

Over three years ago, we started on a journey -- to empower consumers with tools to help make better health decisions and drive better health outcomes. We believed that the simplest, easiest way to start was to give consumers their data in a secure and private way, and allow them to share it from provider to provider, keep it in one place over time, and learn about it in order to make better daily health decisions. That simple idea was the beginning of HealthVault.

Back then, there were a lot of objections. Consumers don’t want their data. Consumers can’t understand their data. Their data might actually do them harm…blah…blah…blah…

But fortunately, things have shifted. Consumers have made it pretty clear that they want to be involved in their health – as evidenced by looking at social networking sites like PatientsLikeMe, the raw numbers of health Internet Searches, or research reports like The American Public on Health Care: The Missing Perspective, released by the CEG, Accenture and IOM:

· 78% of American favor giving doctors the ability to share access to their medical records if done with their permission.

· 66% said that they see the value in including their own information anonymously in a large database to help researchers.

And I’m happy to say for a number of reasons that consumer products like HealthVault and GoogleHealth continue to gain market traction.

Today marks another milestone – the first Industry-wide initiative to establish a “Declaration of Health Data rights” to support patients’ rights to access and share their own health information – https://healthdatarights.org will go live tonight, along with blog posts and endorsements from thought leaders and organizations across the country.

While we’re making change, and it's great to see so many organizations and thought leaders coming together, it’s important that we not stop here…that we continue to move forward—specifically by ensuring that consumer access to their data is included in the definition of “meaningful use.” While I’m optimistic about what I see -- what’s been laid out seems to focus on driving real outcomes improvement in the health care system -- we will not be successful without further refinements. Consumers cannot just be given access to data in static form, but must be provided with an electronic copy of their data so they can easily share it, use it, add to it -- creating a lifelong health data asset. In the end, consumers are the ones accountable for their own health.

The willingness to succeed is only exceeded by the willingness to prepare

pnblog — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:24:00 GMT

After many long months of discussion and debate, the first draft of Meaningful Use has come out. I’m optimistic about what I see -- what’s been laid out seems to focus on driving real outcomes improvement in the health care system.

It’s important that we keep this in mind -- that we’re not just trying to implement technology. We’re trying to improve the performance of the health system. And our willingness to succeed should only be exceeded by our willingness to prepare, and as part of that preparation, we must ensure that flexibility, scalability, and interoperability are inherent traits in the system. Why? Because, health is fundamentally data-driven. Nobody -- physicians, consumers, hospitals, insurance companies, governments -- can make good decisions without good data.

So driving data liquidity -- that is the ability for data to flow throughout the system -- has to be the critical focus. For years, we’ve been building systems in a “top-down” way to reach information, but what we need to do is build from the information up. One thing Carol Diamond said at a Health Affairs event that I attended with her really struck me -- the idea of bringing the question to the data -- leaving the data where it is and bringing the question/problem/issue to it. For a long time, what we did as an industry was use expensive research grants and complex tools to cull and compile data that was intended to answer one specific question, and by the time we’d sorted through the data enough to answer that question, it was either out of date or ten other, more pressing questions had popped up in the meantime. What we need is a system that unlocks all of the data that exists already in the health care sphere, and allows it to flow between silos so that when questions arise, we can bring those questions to the data for quick, evidence based answers -- rather than the other way around.

Given this, as discussions/refinements continue around meaningful use, I believe it’s critical for the following to be a part of the final definition:

· We can’t just capture data, it must be available in “real-time” in order make the right decisions and improve outcomes -- whether we’re talking about patients or populations.

· We have to enable data to become liquid -- specifically, doing this by separating data from applications. This is one of the recommendations from a study by the National Research Council of the National Academies that takes a look at what types of computational technology and investments are best for improving health outcomes. Let the excuse not be that the data is trapped in systems that we built, that we have to wait for standards.

· We’ve got to give consumers access to their data -- not just in static form -- but empower them with an electronic copy so they can easily share it, use it, add to it–creating a lifelong health data asset.

· We should accelerate the objective of having PHR access to EHR data to the 2011 Objectives and Measures. There is no need to wait until 2015. These technologies are available today and will bring real, sustainable benefits, not just for consumers, but for the overall health care system.

· We must ensure that we do not have an overly-prescriptive certification regime that focuses on certifying features and functions every-other-year. This will produce the unintended consequence of stifling innovation. Software vendors will be forced to develop towards a certified feature list rather than look for new and better ways to improve clinical processes and health outcomes,

The foundation of success is based upon data liquidity, and so it must be central to our thinking as we prepare for the future.

Interesting week of interactions

pnblog — Sat, 02 May 2009 21:36:00 GMT

It has been an interesting week for me, participating in three different events in the last seven days. With HIMSS at the beginning of the April -- it has been a real opportunity to get a snapshot of what folks are thinking, planning and worrying about in these hyper-active times of HiTech and health reform.

Thursday, I was on a panel at the Markle Foundation’s Connecting for Health event -- talking about ARRA, meaningful use and certification. I have to give a lot of credit to the Markle folks and participants for driving a very well thought out set of principles and priorities for ONC to consider in defining both meaningful use and certification, and more importantly reminding everyone of what the goals of HIT are all about -- better health outcomes. They had an impressive crowd of thought leaders at the event (which shows the interest in getting meaningful use defined right) and they have a broad and growing group who are supporting their consensus position. You can read more about it here -- and Microsoft is supporting the recommendations, along with many others.

Last Friday and Saturday, I participated in Innovation 2009, hosted by Health Evolution Partners, led by David Brailer. The participants and speakers were fabulous (and I'm not generally a fan of conferences). The discussion centered around new business ideas, how to innovate, the challenges facing large companies and the policy frameworks required to get the U.S. to the promised land of better health outcomes at the same or lower costs. I am an entrepreneur at heart (this being my 5th start up), so it was really exciting and a bit unexpected to hear from the many companies doing innovative and very focused things in the broad health ecosystem. I won't enumerate them here -- but suffice it to say the number of follow up actions I left with from this conference exceeded HIMSS -- which had a 1000 times the attendance. (Perhaps this is an indication of where innovation is happening). We had lots of discussion about the need for health reform -- that it should encourage innovation in multiple directions (care delivery, payment, new entrants). And a very real fear was raised -- that reform could actually stifle innovation. One discussion point was the 'public plan' option being floated by the administration and a prominent spokesperson said implementation of that "would be a catastrophe!"

On Monday and Tuesday, I participated in the Milken Institute Global Conference. They also do a great job of getting world class speakers, but given there are over 3k participants, it was a very different feel than Innovation 2009 with less than 200. The Milken conference is broad -- finance, credit, energy, international, education and health. What really strikes me is the number of folks that go to the conference that are really interested in the challenges and opportunities in health. I was fortunate enough to participate in a great conversation between Elias Zerhouni (former head of NIH), Jamie Heywood (founder of patientslikeme.com and super smart guy), Anne Wojcicki (founder of 23andme.com and super smart gal), and others about the critical challenges in the current paradigm of clinical trials and therapeutic discovery. Increasing the rate of discovering what works in health (precisely identifying the disease, finding targeted cures, providing feedback loops) is critical to addressing the cost crisis, the quality challenges and improving health outcomes. Here again, the system is failing (FDA, large drug companies) because the framework, institutional infrastructure and information platforms aren't flexible and adaptive enough to deal with the real needs of today. As a result, new groups are forming to find ways to innovate either around or completely alongside the existing institutions to accelerate knowledge -- like Alpha 1, patientslikeme.com, collabrx and many others. It is interesting to note the role of philanthropy and foundations in changing how the science and infrastructure is being driven -- groups like the Canary foundation and FasterCures and of course the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The flu pandemic has been the center of the news and was certainly a topic in all of the conferences above. From helping to prevent pandemics, to accelerating knowledge and understanding, to improving health outcomes and increasing access to quality health care -- information technology and platforms -- are critical.

History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself

pnblog — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:17:00 GMT

(cross-posted on Microsoft on the Issues)

My family and I just got back from a vacation in Mexico, so the news that’s on everyone’s mind—the spread of H1N1 Influenza A—is weighing even more heavily on me. With the media hype machine driving minute by minute coverage, it’s hard not to think about devastating epidemics and pandemics of the past—typhoid fever, smallpox, bubonic plague, cholera, Spanish Flu, typhus, tuberculosis, malaria, HIV/AIDs—illnesses that spread uncontrollably and killed millions.

While we should be concerned, we should also remember just how far we’ve come in facing these challenges. Today, the Internet, blogs, instant messaging, and other technologies can disseminate information about new threats and new medical knowledge faster than ever before. Technology gives us the opportunity to face these crises better than we have in the past.

Yet we still have a long way to go. The identification of threats and the transmission of basic information remains a fundamental challenge. News of the recent outbreak broke on April 24^th—18 days after public health officials started investigating unusual cases of respiratory illness in Mexico. Eighteen days doesn’t sound like a long time, but in the world of infectious diseases, it can be the different between life and death. According to The Rapid Syndrome Validation Project, a delay of even one day in detecting certain diseases like smallpox could mean the "…difference between the loss and salvage of as much as 90 percent of an exposed population.” I think we all can agree that we can do better than 18 days.

And now as the disease progresses, do we have the right information platforms in place to enable front line workers and public health folks to gather, transmit, analyze data, and ultimately act? We have a highly fragmented health system in the US, and it is much more complex when you look globally, where we have language barriers and in many regions, no infrastructure in place. Since SARS and the anthrax attacks, there have been a lot of pilot projects and investment in infrastructure – but perhaps not yet enough. More importantly, I believe that a “separate” infrastructure for public health (or the buzz word ‘bio-surveillance’) isn’t the best approach because systems that aren’t used every day are never up to date. Just look at the challenges and barriers to the CDC’s BioSense National Program—a program with admirable goals, but limited results in terms of hospitals actually reporting data. A better approach is to have flexible enterprise data systems that allow for the re-use and re-purposing of data quickly and easily, because these are the types of systems that enable us to prepare and respond to these by definition unknowable future issues.

I do what I do because I believe that technology, if employed correctly, can be a transformative force. It can act as a key enabler to improve surveillance, diagnosis, treatment monitoring and prevention. The people on the front lines managing this crisis are doing an incredible job, under intense pressure. I have to say how impressed I am with the professionalism and commitment of these public health officials—internationally and in the US. I’m proud of the work that Microsoft is doing to support them –working closely with local and international authorities to provide technologies and products to support the effort to combat this threat. One example is the work the Internet Explorer team has done to enable people to put Centers for Disease Control health tips and news updates at the top of their browsers through a new swine flu “Web slice” for Internet Explorer 8, now available at www.ieaddons.com.

We have great people. Great technology exists from Microsoft and many other companies. The threats aren’t going away. Time to build a platform to ‘really’ deal with them.

Signposts

pnblog — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 20:57:00 GMT

I don't normally blog about our products per se, but today marks an important milestone for Microsoft shipping solutions that are important signposts toward the future -- the transformation of healthcare.

The first is the launch of the Mayo Clinic Health Manager powered by HealthVault -- the focus of this solution is to enable the 'family health manager' to organize her information in one place and receive customized recommendations. The second is New York Presbyterian’s realization of a ‘connected health environment’ that brings together information on the clinic or hospital side using Amalga and extends it to patients through the introduction of mynyp.org via HealthVault. Each of these solutions concretely demonstrates how collaboratively we can move health systems forward today -- connecting users with their clinical information and providing interactive, personalized tools to empower them further.

The HiTech stimulus and health reform policy debates acknowledge the importance of information technology in transforming the health system...however questions remain about the how and shape of that transformation. Last week, I finished the Innovator's Prescription by Clay Christensen et al., which I strongly recommend to folks trying to understand the types of disruptive innovation that can and should occur in the health ecosystem to improve outcomes and change the cost dynamic. The books brings a new vocabulary that can help advance the discussion -- and highlights the importance of new business models in creating innovation. We need a different business model to deal with chronic care and prevention. I am confident that technology in general and the type of technology we are building and deploying with these innovative leaders in particular is critical to enabling these new business models.

It is exciting to go from ideas -- to plans -- to prototypes -- to actually shipping solutions that tear down the walls of data silos and begin the journey of using liberated data to deliver new solutions for consumers/patients. We are still early in this journey, and I look forward to getting feedback from users -- consumers, clinical users and IT professionals -- on how to improve the capability and usefulness of our solutions.

Tear Down the Walls and Liberate the Data

pnblog — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:13:00 GMT

(cross-posted on Microsoft on the Issues)

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan gave one of his most well remembered speeches. Few of us could forget his words to Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”—proving to be prophetic when the German Democratic Republic announced the re-opening of the border in 1989, and the subsequent destruction of the Berlin Wall. What followed? A new flow of people, ideas, commerce, and capital—creating the groundwork for unification and a better way of life in Germany and Eastern Europe, benefiting all of us economically and politically in unanticipated ways.

A similar type of disruptive change needs to happen in the health ecosystem today. Just as the free flow of ideas and capital were the foundation for dramatic improvements in society, so should the free flow of health data be the foundation for realizing a future of secure, personalized, data driven medicine in health.

Yet many outdated ideas and mechanisms stand in the way of change; the most important of which are the now impractical walls that were erected and still exist around patient-data. And all of us—IT vendors, providers, payers, pharmacy benefit managers, policy makers and others in the health ecosystem have enabled the walls to exist in spite of the obvious benefits to patient safety and the overall health economy.

Real-time, accessible, meaningful and comprehensive data is fundamental to health care as a whole–to make a diagnosis, provide quality care, pay the right bill, discover new therapies, and so on. What’s of paramount importance is liberating the data and making it available for re-use in different contexts. This is critical for improving outcomes, paying for value, creating a learning healthcare system, enabling discoveries and fundamentally changing the dynamics of the ecosystem. We should be treating health data as a vital asset—health enterprises and consumers—to drive an efficient, high-quality, value-based, evidence-focused future for medicine.

So why isn’t there data liquidity or the appropriate flow of data in the ecosystem? There are two major walls preventing the liberation of data and each is starting to have some cracks.

First, there is the “it’s-my-data” wall put up by hospitals, insurance plans, pharmacy benefit managers, and others. They believe there is some competitive advantage by keeping the data inside their walls. And there are lots of excuses supporting their position–patients don’t want it, they can’t understand it, it might do them harm blah, blah, blah. This wall is starting to crack. Many institutions recognize that the consumer has a right to a copy of their data and are making the appropriate connections to personally controlled health data repositories like HealthVault or Google Health. Many others are writing about it too—John Moore asserted in a recent post, “Personal health data belongs to the consumer and the consumer should decide how it is shared. This is a very radical concept that still has most providers, payers and other data holders shaking in their boots.”

The second wall is the “waiting-for-the-right-standards-set-by-government” wall. There are multiple excuses buttressing this wall; the core of which come down to technology, standards or policy excuses. Without debating each point–one inexcusable barrier is the IT enterprise system vendors who make it difficult or expensive to get access to the data, to separate it from the application. They believe that proprietary “lock-in” provides them with a strategic advantage. We’re all in business and need to create strategic value for our products, but let’s do it in the application layer—rules, workflow, user experience, price, or services—not by trapping patient data in a proprietary database structure.

Our customers and partners and their customers need to be able to re-use their health data, and in ways they haven’t always thought of or anticipated. They have to be able to build cross-vendor systems to improve care. If information can be made liquid—flowing from where it is generated to where it is needed, and combining it with other bits of information to provide a comprehensive view—it can be tremendously powerful.

We, in the IT industry, can step up and be a driving force in enabling data to become liquid—specifically, doing this by separating data from applications. This is one of the recommendations from a study by the National Research Council of the National Academies that takes a look at what types of computational technology and investments are best for improving health outcomes. Let the excuse not be that the data is trapped in systems that we built, that we have to wait for standards.

We need to enable this, and we can start to do it today. Just look at the Health Information Exchange in Wisconsin and CVS MinuteClinic. In the former, value is being added immediately to users in the ED, without requiring all the participating EDs to change their systems or to be standards compliant (or CCHIT certified). At MinuteClinics, summary after-visit health data are made available to customers online using the Continuity of Care Record standard.

There’s a proven model for extracting and transforming data in many ways—HL7 feeds, non-HL7 feeds, web services, database replication, XML and XSLT, and more—and along the way we can create value by interpreting the data and adding metadata. At Microsoft, we’re doing it today both in the enterprise with Amalga and across enterprises to the consumer with HealthVault. We hope other vendors follow this lead to drive better outcomes for patients, and we expect buyers of IT systems to demand vendors to meet this standard (excuse the pun). Where standards are available, we should leverage them, and where standards do not yet exist, we should output the information in a consistent consumable format for the install base.

I understand that there are many, many complicated aspects of this problem, including the need to reform our payment system. But we don’t have to work out everything first to begin building a better, more data enabled, data rich and accessible health delivery system now. David Kibbe did a nice job simplifying and laying out some core recommendations in his post, Five Shovel-Ready Health Care Reforms.

I have argued previously that HiTech should focus on investments which leverage existing digital data sources and drive better health outcomes. With the dollars that are being allocated to EMRs, it’s critical that the data is liquid and that the consumer is connected to the data in a meaningful way

I understand that this kind of disruptive change can be uncomfortable because the forces unleashed can lead to unpredictable results for specific stakeholders. But like the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is clear that the most important stakeholder—the citizen or patient—will be better off, and the other key stakeholders—providers, payers, policy makers, etc.—will participate in a healthier ecosystem. There will be profound, new opportunities for everyone in this future.

The time for excuses is over. Let’s tear down the walls and get the data flowing. We can do it now.

Health Affairs event and special issue on Health IT

pnblog — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 07:20:00 GMT

Today I spoke at a very well attended Health Affairs event in Washington DC -- originally designed (months ago in a different time warp in HIT light years) to discuss lessons learned by folks leveraging HIT in effective ways, along with the usual challenges, issues and opportunities. Naturally the discussion was hijacked by the implications, potential consequences and opportunities raised by the ARRA stimulus act and the HITech portion of it in particular.

There is much to report from the event -- because there were a lot of smart and thoughtful panelists -- and because the issues are at the same time complicated, familiar and not super well understood. I don't have time to cover them all in this post.

There is a strong consensus (it showed up in comments from many panelists) around the theme I care most about -- which is we must focus on the outcomes one wants to achieve (better health outcomes at the same or lower cost) and then encourage innovation between providers and technology suppliers to deliver those outcomes. Said another way -- technology is a tool (a means) and not an end in itself. This is why health reform and the health stimulus have to be intertwined and self-reinforcing. Just spending money on HIT is not going to lead to the 'down payment' (i.e. future savings) that Obama believes it is.

Mark Smith brought this to life most effectively in his remarks -- that by adding a computer to Kramer's bookstore you don't end up turning it into Amazon.com. Kaiser reported in the article summarizing the experience in Hawaii with KP Healthconnect (EMR) -- that family practice office visits went down by 25+%. For Kaiser, an integrated delivery network and health plan -- that is a benefit to their bottom line. (I should note patient satisfaction went up in this period because needs were met by phone/email -- a totally win/win situation for Kaiser and consumer alike). For a more typical, small office family physician -- that is a disaster...because revenues are tied to visits. To succeed, we have to change the paradigm of healthcare away from the tyranny of the visit based payment system (Kramer's bookstore) and reward longitudinal care systems (future amazon.com). If we spend a bunch of money automating existing systems of care -- and not enabling new platforms -- we have missed the huge opportunity to make a difference.

Carol Diamond made the subtle, but I think hugely important point that has not fully sunk in to the folks waiting at the starting line of the HIT land rush -- that the public is going to expect accountability for improved outcomes with the stimulus spend. Health touches everyone -- and if the country spends $30+Billion dollars on 'investment' and the average citizen experience with the health delivery network is no different and costs continue to rise -- there is going to be accountability for where did the money go. She is rightly trying to focus the minds of the folks with the wagons -- better pick your spots wisely -- just getting a homestead isn't good enough -- it had better be productive land.

My biggest ah-ha moment came a few hours after the event in a conversation with the CEO of a large player in the healthcare supply chain. I realized that a significant portion of the Health Affairs event, the broader conversation about overall HIT investments and the specific conversation I was having ALL ACKNOWLEDGED and CONCLUDED that individuals (people, patients, consumers, whatever label we want to use) have a right to a personally controlled health record and that the personally controlled health data management platform is a critical component (perhaps a necessary component) of ANY FUTURE HEALTH IT SYSTEM and probably any payment reform system.

The ah-ha point is -- Microsoft has made a difference -- a huge difference -- by taking the leadership role it did 3 years ago by investing in building, defining, evangelizing, shipping and refining a personally controlled health data management system, HealthVault. We have a long way to go to make it easy, ubiquitous and fully connected -- and to deliver the value I know it will to consumers/patients in their everyday health lives. But I know it is a good and innovative idea and one that has changed and framed the debate in a positive way. While I have always believed that -- to see the effect and reality of the impact -- made my day.

The Truth About Health IT Standards – There’s No Good Reason to Delay Data Liquidity and Information Sharing

pnblog — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 03:26:00 GMT

David C. Kibbe and Peter Neupert

Now that the Obama administration and Congress have committed to spending billions of tax payers’ money on health IT as part of the economic stimulus package, it’s important to be clear about what consumers and patients ought to expect in return—better decision-making by doctors and patients.

The thing is, nobody can make good decisions without good data. Unfortunately, too many in our industry use data “lock-in” as a tactic to keep their customers captive. Policy makers’ myopic focus on standards and certification does little but provide good air cover for this status quo. Our fundamental first step has to be to ensure data liquidity – making it easy for the data to move around and do some good for us all.

We suggest the following three goals ought to be achieved by end of 2009:

Patients’ clinical data (diagnoses, medications, allergies, lab results, immunization history, etc.) are available to doctors in 75% of emergency rooms, clinic offices, and hospitals within their region.
Patients’ doctors or medical practices have a “face sheet” that lets any staff member see an all-up view of their relevant health data, including visit status, meds, labs, images, all of which is also viewable to patients via the Web.
Every time patients see providers, they are given an electronic after-visit report that includes what was done and what the next steps for care will be according to best practices and evidence-based protocols, whenever these are applicable.

Some who view this seemingly humble list of achievements will say that we can’t do it, because the standards aren’t ready, or the data is too complex. They’ll say that delays are necessary, due to worries about privacy or because too much data is still on paper.

We disagree. We believe that where there’s a will, there is going to be a way. And we already know most of what we need to know to achieve these goals. We know that:

huge amounts of digital data exist, already formatted electronically, but scattered across many proprietary systems (meds, labs, images).
software and the Internet makes it possible—in a low cost, lightweight way—to get data out of these databases to the point of decision making (to the ER doctor, the patient/consumer, or the primary care physician).
people are hungry for information in whatever form they can get it:

Getting it on paper is better than nothing
Getting it quickly is better than getting it late
Getting it in non-standard digital format is better than paper (software is pretty good at transforming non-standard to standard formats)
Getting it in a standard format is better
Getting it in a structured, standard format is best

An integration “big bang” -- getting everybody all of a sudden onto one, single, structured and standard format—can’t and won’t happen.

We don’t have to wait for new standards to make data accessible—we can do a ton now without standards. What we need more than anything else is for people to demand that their personal health data are separated from the software applications that are used to collect and store the data.

This idea of separating health data from the applications is very important, and a better way to frame the discussion about how to achieve data liquidity than is the term “interoperability,” which we find cumbersome and opaque. Smart people, armed with software, can do incredible things with data in any format – so long as they can get to it.

Customers of health information systems want to re-use their health data, and in ways they haven’t always thought of or anticipated. However, many enterprise system vendors make it difficult or expensive to get access to the data—to separate it from the application. They believe that proprietary “lock-in” allows them some form of strategic advantage.

We understand that IT vendors are in business, and need to create strategic value for their products. And we are very much in favor of that—in rules, in workflow, in user experience, price and flexibility, and so on. However, vendors should not be able to “lock” the patient or enterprise data into their applications, and thereby inhibit the ability of customers and partners to build cross-vendor systems that improve care.

It’s possible for vendors to provide value without the need for lock-in. There are lots of examples of this, for example, the Health Information Exchange in Wisconsin and CVS MinuteClinic. In the former, value is clearly being added immediately to users in the ED, without requiring all the participating EDs to change their systems or to be standards compliant (or CCHIT certified). At MinuteClinics, summary after-visit health data are made available to customers online using the Continuity of Care Record standard. This is where the low hanging fruit is.

There’s already a proven model for extracting and transforming data in many ways – HL7 feeds, non-HL7 feeds, web services, database replication, XML and XSLT, and more – and along the way wecan create value by interpreting the data and adding metadata. Microsoft is doing it today– both in the enterprise with Amalga and and across enterprises to the consumer with HealthVault. We hope other vendors follow this lead to drive better outcomes for patients.

Unlike the physical world where there is a need for dejure standards—think railroad tracks—in the software world, there is much more flexibility and the standards that work are the ones that evolve from USAGE and market acceptance.    The certification and standards road equals conferences, press releases, “connectathons”, caregivers-turned-bureaucrats. The outcomes road equals immediate benefits to actual caregivers AND learning we can apply to the next round, and the next, and the next.

We have given the industry decades to make this happen --- and just in the last 1-2 years have people finally gotten fed up and just started moving. Our great risk here is that the people lobbying for dollars and certification today are the people who are invested in the old road. With the amount of money we are talking about, we run the risk of just giving them another decade to delay and plan.   Instead, let’s put the dollars into rewarding behavior and outcomes, and let the people who live with the problems every day figure out how to solve them.

When we set out to go to the moon in the 1960’s we didn’t say “let’s build a great rocket.”   So, too, in this case we shouldn’t say “let’s buy a great IT system.”   Our measurements should be tied to what we want – better care, informed by the data that is just out there waiting for us to use it.

David C Kibbe MD MBA is a Family Physician and Senior Adviser to the American Academy of Family Physicians who consults on health care professional and consumer technologies. Peter Neupert is Health Solutions Group Corporate Vice President at Microsoft.

Message to Washington -- It's all about Outcomes

pnblog — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:35:00 GMT

Yesterday, I testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, otherwise known as HELP. You can see a video of my testimony here. Before getting to the substance, I need to highlight how I continue to be awe-inspired about how our government works -- in a positive way. Any body can walk into the halls of Congress and sit in and listen to a hearing. Folks from all walks of life have input via a variety of means -- and while I get it's not perfect and can be better -- I remain proud of our democratic system and feel honored to be able to contribute/participate in it.

My main message to the Senate was: We should really focus on the health outcomes we want to achieve, not just on the technology itself. What the health system needs is to adopt technology in ways to deliver better outcomes, better chronic care management, better hospital effectiveness. We really want to make sure that we have the leadership focused on encouraging the usage of technology to achieve certain goals, like better chronic care management.

We were the only technology company testifying, and I think people were surprised to hear us saying that technology isn’t the silver bullet. It's not that Microsoft doesn't want to see spending on health care technology. Far from it. We just want to see smart spending, on technology that will really have impact. When we decided to go to the moon, we didn't say let's build a great rocket...we said let's go to the moon...I feel a little bit of the conversation has been about let’s build a great rocket and hope we get to the moon.

The other witnesses included Health Leadership Council President Mary Grealy, National Quality Forum President Janet Corrigan, Permanente Federation Executive Director Jack Cochran and Valerie Melvin, Director of information technology for the Government Accounting Office. Their comments were unexpectedly aligned with mine -- namely take a holistic view; incenting the adoption of technology is not a silver bullet; and, we must have reform of the payment system too. So at a high level -- folks understand the challenges of creating the right kind of change in the complex health ecosystem. Where the differences lie -- is how to get started. Unfortunately as is often the case -- the stimulus bill (big incremental spend investing in health IT) is separate from the activities around health reform. Getting the spend without the right payment system reform -- could lead to the unintended consequences the panel was cautioning against.

The legislation is being drafted now -- that is why the hearing was held on a day when there was a lot of other activity going on in the Senate. There is a clear sense that something big will pass in 2-3 weeks - which is like moving at the speed of light. I am sympathetic to the challenges of the staffers trying to find the right language -- it is not easy to figure out how to guide the spend of $20billion over two years! The scale of spend is still hard to put into perspective for me -- in my last post I tried a per physician number, so this time let's try per day -- it is $27M/day! I am very confident there is lots of low hanging fruit to generate a return on investment in the health system (waste, overuse, misuse, error reduction) that technology can enable -- but still $27M/day!

Since I spend the bulk of my time building software -- decisions about features, hiring great people, how and where to sell -- the hardest question from the staffers to answer is - how do you recommend we spend the money?

My answer is in my closing remarks with the five key things that I think the government needs to focus on:

1. Encourage innovation in health IT by setting out objective goals and criteria, not by mandating specific technologies or development models.

2. Reward innovative doctors who make the Internet the foundation of the patient-physician connection.

3. Provide incentives for sharing data.

4. Focus on making data interoperable today, not waiting for standards tomorrow, and insist that vendors separate data from applications.

5. Enable the private sector to develop an information infrastructure that connects data, systems, and people.

These are really critical, so we don’t end up in the wrong place. They’re based on our learnings as we’ve delved into this complex world of health.

One final thought -- surely it is an exciting time to be in the health information technology business! I personally got passionate about trying to really contribute and make a difference in HIT from my time on the President's Information Technology Advisory Council (PITAC) in 2003-2005. As co-chair of the Health Subcommittee -- we published a report titled Revolutionizing Health Care Through Information Technology with key recommendations for the government to consider. While my depth of understanding has gone up dramatically, what I find is both fascinating and perhaps cautionary -- is the discussion is largely on the same key issues/recommendations. This time there is a lot of money at stake -- but it goes to show that change is hard and probably slow.

I had a great exchange with Fox News --- video embedded below.

You can also read more about Microsoft's general views on a number of topics here.

Before you finalize your Health IT shopping list

pnblog — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:23:18 GMT

The mad dash for health reform continues in earnest as stakeholders from all parts of the health ecosystem work to inform, engage and encourage the incoming Administration. The need for reform is obvious and the dialog is positive -- I continue to worry that 'soundbite solutions' will get in the way of a serious discussion of principles, desired outcomes and alternatives to achieve a good return on investment on 'change.'

As a business guy -- one that has worked on startup initiatives over most of my life -- I tried to put into context what it means to invest an 'incremental $50B' in health IT. It sounds like a lot of money -- something on the order of $83k per practicing physician -- we ought to be able to do something spectacular for that kind of money.

There is a new study out by the National Research Council of the National Academies that takes a look at what types of computational technology and investments are best for improving health outcomes. I recommend folks read it (full disclosure I was both interviewed and a reviewer). Many folks I talk with in the computer science industry recognize the huge benefits that will be gained in medicine and health outcomes with thoughtful investments in information technology. Many (myself included) are technology optimists and believe that information technology will ultimately disrupt and transform health delivery.

But to achieve this transformation -- we have to acknowledge the reality of the institutions and systems currently in place; we have to invest in the new kinds of architectures and IT systems that will deliver real value over time. This report is bi-partisan and a timely reminder of key principles by experts -- one that I hope informs the health reform spending debate before folks finish their HIT shopping list and count too much on electronic health records as a simplistic cure-all.

The study acknowledges the need for comprehensive patient data, empowerment of consumers/families with personal health information and for flexibility in systems design to enable new advances in biology to be integrated effectively -- among many other principles.

Here are a few of the topline recommendations (pages S-9 and S-10) from the report I chose to highlight because they are so important and often get lost in the 'soundbite solutions' debate:

incentivize clinical performance gains rather than the acquisition of IT, per se
encourage initiatives to empower iterative process improvement and small-scale optimization
develop the necessary data infrastructure for health care improvement by aggregating data regarding people, processes, and outcomes from all sources.
insists that vendors supply IT that permits the separation of data from applications and facilitates data transfers to and from other non-vendor applications in sharable and generally useful formats

If the country is going to invest $50B in incremental health IT -- we all want it to be invested wisely. The question is; what will generate the most benefit and how can we accomplish it? We should be building an asset with this investment - and the asset is not an application per se -- but a health data asset that can be used to improve both individual outcomes and the performance of the institutions and the system overall. Individuals should be encouraged to create and manage their health data asset and to learn how to share it to achieve better outcomes and interactions with the health delivery system. Similarly - health enterprises should invest in building and sharing health data assets that enable them to have a culture of process improvement over time.

Rush to Reform

pnblog — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:50:53 GMT

I haven't posted for awhile -- mostly because I have been busy with customers, development projects, and the impact of the economic crisis -- but also because I’ve felt that there has been so much noise and anticipation around the priorities of the incoming Administration that reading seemed more valuable than posting.

It is clear that 'reforming the health system' is a priority -- and that’s positive. Daschle has promised lots of conversations in homes around the country on this important topic, which may be illuminating and instructive for all (or not). Certainly the industry stakeholders -- executives, pundits, vendors etc. -- are all lining up their policy principles, suggested areas of priorities, options for reform and the like. You can read them everywhere--in the news, at conferences, and in blogs.

In the current bailout climate, which I fear is corrupting the minds of many otherwise thoughtful people; the risk of well intentioned changes having negative unintended consequences (economic sink holes as well as lack of systemic improvement) is high.

Despite the risks, I remain encouraged that some positive things can happen. No matter what priorities and tactics within health reform are chosen, substantial health information technology will be a necessary ingredient. There is a growing consensus that increasing health data liquidity/exchange is the first order priority (see here and here for recent examples). This is the position we staked out three years ago, and the ongoing focus of our investments.

Refactoring the question of HIT and health reform from "subsiding EMR adoption" to "incenting the use of shared data and personal, connected tools to improve care" is real progress. There is lots of valuable electronic health data today. The first investment priority should be to get more value (reuse vs. re-create, physician/consumer access and use of data in decision making) out of what exists already, instead of funding more source systems..

My last thought for the morning on HIT and health reform isthat the technology question should also be refactored. Rather than focusing on infrastructure investments(more EMRs, more HIEs, build it and they will come dreams here-- this is input focused), the appropriate focus should be choosing an outcomes goal -- say reduce diabetes by 50% in 5 years. Let innovative people inside and outside the industry pull the right technology into adoption to meet an ambitious goal. Yes, changes in reimbursement need to happen for this to work, but this is true in all cases. The technology exists today. The real adoption challenge is not about incentives to buy it, but rather about rewarding those who use it well to achieve better outcomes -- for patients, for themselves and for payers.