The State of Health IT according to the American Hospital Association

Last week, the American Hospital Association released a major document. Framed as comments on a major federal initiative, the proposed Stage 2 Meaningful Use criteria by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) , the letter also conveys a rather sorrowful message about the state of health IT in the United States...

According to the AHA (translated into my own rather harsh words), the state of health IT in American hospitals is as follows:

- Few hospitals and doctors can fulfill basic requirements of health care quality and cost control. For instance, 62% could not record basic patient health indicators such as weight and blood pressure (page 51 of their report) in electronic health records (EHRs).
- Many EHR vendors can't support the meaningful use criteria in real-life settings, even when their systems were officially certified to do so. I'll cite some statements from the AHA report later in the article. Meaningful use is a big package of reforms, of course, promulgated over just a few years, but it's also difficult because vendors and hospitals had also been heading for a long time in the opposite direction: toward closed, limited functionality...

Doctors still record huge globs of patient data in unstructured text format...

Quality reporting is a mess...

Government hasn't stepped up to the plate to perform its role in supporting electronic reporting...

There's no easy place to assign blame for a system that is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year while sticking the US public with rising costs...