News Feature | July 12, 2013

Physicians Question CCHIT's HIT Framework Report

Source: Health IT Outcomes
Greg Bengel

By Greg Bengel, contributing writer

HIT

While CCHIT’s framework stresses the development health IT, physicians question its feasibility.

According to the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), the development and use of a health IT framework is vital to the success of ACOs. As such, the CCHIT recently released a report titled A Health IT Framework for Accountable Care, which they call, “A guide to developing a technology roadmap that will mitigate some of the risks associated with taking on accountability for costs, quality of care, and patient loyalty.”

CCHIT’s framework outlines the primary health IT requirements for supporting accountable care. An EHR Intelligence summarizes the key requirements:

  • Information sharing – “Without the ability to exchange health information efficiently and securely between members of the care team as well as patients and patient representatives, care coordination cannot take place,” reports EHR Intelligence.  
  • Data collection and aggregation – The CCHIT’s framework stresses setting up a “data warehouse” that can store and integrate data from multiple systems.  
  • Patient safety monitoring – The framework realizes the importance of analyzing health IT programs to see how they affect overall safety, as the adoption of health IT programs may “present threats to patient safety if improperly implemented or misused.”  
  • Privacy and security protections – As with patient safety monitoring, the risks that health IT poses to both privacy and security need to be scrutinized to make sure entities are in line with HIPAA regulations.

According to a 2011 report by HIMSS Analytics, only about 30 percent of U.S. hospitals use the data warehouses called for by the CCHIT.  While they recognize the importance of HIT, both physicians and the CCHIT acknowledge the difficulties of setting up such frameworks. The report summarizes the difficulties as follows: the promise of accountable care is tempered by “a lack of experience and knowledge about the HIT infrastructure necessary to optimally support health care transformations.”

Information Week Healthcare expresses the same thought, but much more bluntly. It first cites the CCHIT’s suggestion of using “technologies that can assess acuity of care, record and display patient and family needs and circumstances, present benefit and health plan provider network information, and access real-time information on available beds and personnel, for appropriate setting of care.” It then quotes Grace Terrell, MD, CEO of Cornerstone Health care, who observes simply, “No healthcare organization has these kinds of capabilities today. The framework as it’s constructed is about where we need to go, not where we are now. It’s not doable for anybody right now with the current technology and infrastructure we have today.”