Healthcare IT Evaluated After Boston Marathon Tragedy
By John Oncea, Editor
Follow John on Twitter: @buck25
The Boston Marathon bombing reveals strengths and weaknesses of healthcare IT as it is currently structured.
The recent Boston Marathon bombing not only provided us with examples, albeit unwelcome ones, of heroic acts in the face of adversity, but it also provided the healthcare industry an opportunity to gauge and assess its effectiveness.
Bernie Monegain writes on Healthcare IT News that IT played a key role in treating victims of the bombing. Monegain quotes John Halamka, MD, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston as saying, “From an IT perspective maintaining a high bandwidth, reliable and secure infrastructure was key. The demand for communication – voice, email, social media and streaming video was very high. The scalability built into the design of all our systems – networks, servers, storage, and client devices – served us well."
The success that Beth Isreal realized during this crisis was not by accident. Nearly three years ago Halamka wrote for Health IT Outcomes of lessons learned while troubleshooting a complex infrastructure problem affecting his community EHR hosting private cloud. Halamka wrote then "Outages are painful, but they can bring people together. They can build trust, foster communication, and improve processes by testing downtime plans in a real world scenario. The result of our recent incident was a better plan for the future, improved infrastructure, and a universal understanding of the network design among the entire team - an excellent long term outcome."
Monegain also spoke with Scott Ogawa, CTO and deputy CIO, Boston Children’s Hospital who said, “Like many organizations, Boston Children’s Hospital trains for a myriad of emergencies. We have a very detailed hospital incident command system, HICS, in which key departments are always at the ready. Information technology is just one of the many HICS command positions which are on-call at all times."
iHealthBeat reflected on the positive impact Twitter had in sharing information after the bombings, including Tufts Medical Center using tweets to provide updates on its patient count and to inform potential patients that anyone needing care should use the facility's emergency entrance.
Tom Sullivan of Government Health IT recounts additional stories of social media being used, as well as, “The Boston Public Health Commission (posting) to its healthy boston blog advice on handling such situations, replete with links to CDC resources for healthcare providers after a bombing, and SAMSHA’s page on coping with violence. He goes on to quote Janice Jacobs of HIMSS Social Media Task Force and Dell’s Healthcare Life sciences practice and solutions group who wrote on the HIMSS blog that “increasingly, social media is playing a key role in helping to ease the heavy burden of these tragedies by connecting individuals and communities with each other and with critical resources.”
Sullivan also reflects on the potential for long-term problems developing as a result of social media’s presence quoting Rebecca Greenfield of the Atlantic Wire as saying “While Twitter offered the fastest, most up-to-date, and accurate information, it also served as an unfiltered chronicle of the most distressing imagery, which can have lasting mental and physical effects.”
Deanna Pogorelc, writing for MedCity News, points out health IT gaps that need to be fixed in the next phase of Massachusetts’ health information exchange. Pogorelc writes, “But one area where there’s room for improvement in the process of emergency response is the way information about those patients is, or in this case isn’t, available to the medical personnel who treat the injured.” She quotes David Delano, a project director at Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, as saying “You had multiple people from different parts of the state, maybe even different parts of the country, showing up in hospitals where they’ve likely never been seen before.”
Pogorelc writes “Without having information about a patient’s medical history, current medications, allergies, etc., which all affect how a patient is treated, physicians are left to do their best piecing together what they can about a patient. That may mean rifling through their clothes or belongings and ordering lab tests, which take time and cost money.”
Pogorelc concludes by quoting John Kansky, vice president of strategy and planning for the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE) as saying, “Market by market, the HIE functionality is still all over the board, and it’s going to take a lot more years and a lot more dollars to get to the point where (a patient’s) record is available in an emergency department, period. “That functionality goes far beyond the current Meaningful Use pattern that they’re on. Meaningful Use 2 or 3 is not an endpoint.”