 |
 |
 |
 |
| |
|||||
|
|
|
Home > News & Events > MITRE Publications > The MITRE Digest > | |||||||||||||||||||
|
MITRE Transforms Electronic Health Records February 2008
When you end up in an emergency room or a new doctor's office, it's not likely that you carry along your past medical history in a filebox. Yet the American healthcare industry is still dominated by these all-important paper-based medical records. Without a full picture of your health condition, a lack of information can lead to missed diagnoses, allergic reactions to medications, and other—often grave—medical mistakes. But a MITRE team led by software systems engineer Rob McCready is hoping to change all that by paving the way for accurate, interoperable electronic health records (EHRs). MITRE's "Project Laika" is focused on improving communications among doctors, nurses, and patients by ensuring that EHRs, now available from an increasing pool of vendors, can interoperate with each other. According to Tom Neal, M.D., a MITRE healthcare analyst on the team, Laika has "the potential to help save millions of dollars in healthcare spending and improve the quality of healthcare for years to come." The Laika software testing framework is designed to evaluate the import and export of EHR data against the existing standards. A candidate EHR will be put through its paces to check how accurately the data—for example, the existence of a "do not resuscitate" order—is exchanged between different EHR software programs. A final interoperability report card will outline areas in which each EHR meets the standards, as well as identify specific areas for improvement. Delivering on the Promise of Health Informatics EHRs are software systems that store detailed patient data—everything from vital signs to x-ray images to medication histories to doctor visits. McCready calls them "the red-hot area" in health informatics, or the intersection of information science, computer science, and healthcare.
Health informatics has been cited by MITRE President and CEO Al Grasso as a growing priority for MITRE. And there's no doubt that the health system is a major concern for the U.S. government. Surveys indicate that 60 percent of Americans rate our healthcare system as only fair or poor, and it's well recognized in the industry that advances in health informatics are necessary to bring about positive change. Healthcare technology reform is deemed so critical that in 2004 the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT), an independent nonprofit organization, was formed to help accelerate the adoption of health informatics standards. The following year, CCHIT was awarded a contract by the Department of Health and Human Services to develop, implement, and evaluate the certification criteria and inspection processes for EHRs. "[EHRs are] a big change in how things work in healthcare today," McCready says, "and there's a persistent question—how do we design the structure and exchange of the data associated with a patient so that the right individuals can get to it?" Improving Continuity of Care With more than 200 different EHR systems in the marketplace today, explains McCready, it's critical that these systems all work together so that patients' records follow them as their health circumstances, locations, and doctors change. According to McCready, this issue—known as continuity of care—is one of the biggest pain points in the healthcare industry. With a growing number of non-interoperable EHR systems in the marketplace, continuity of care becomes more important than ever. Team Laika is now developing an open source framework to test whether an EHR is interoperable with the new standard for Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs). The CCD standard is used to exchange health records in a summary form that can be read by any healthcare provider caring for a patient. "If a doctor is going to make major medical decisions based on the electronic data presented to him or her, then the question is how to guarantee that the EHR data is accurate, secure, and provides a complete picture of the patient's current conditions," Neal says. "MITRE has an opportunity to improve the U.S. healthcare system by helping CCHIT validate these electronic medical record systems." Saving Healthcare Dollars "The total healthcare budget in this country is about two trillion dollars, and that represents about 16 percent of the gross domestic product," Neal says. "When you look at it in those terms, you realize there's a tremendous cost savings to doing things right—and we're helping CCHIT do it right. We're making an investment in technology that we believe will create tremendous efficiency—thus saving taxpayer money and helping save lives." CCHIT plans to start its testing process using the Laika software testing framework to certify EHR interoperability in late March 2008. That may not give Team Laika much time, but they're confident they can pull it off. And the potential payoff? "We'll be in a position to be recognized as the body that helped establish a new testing framework that may become the de facto standard for EHR interoperability verification," Neal says. "And that's a tremendous step forward for the public's health concerns and for MITRE's technical contributions in the health sector."
—by Tricia C. Bailey Related Information Articles and News
Websites |
||||||||||||||||||||
| Page last updated: February 29, 2008 | Top of page |
Solutions That Make a Difference.® |
|
|
