Something to Talk About

Have you ever played that party game “Telephone?” The first person in a circle whispers a secret to his neighbor and asks him to pass it along. One by one, each person whispers the secret to the next. When the last person gets the message and repeats out loud what he has heard, everyone is incredulous because the secret comes out so differently than when it began.

Besides being a great icebreaker, the game is an intriguing lesson about the way communication works — or doesn't.

This is a pretty simplistic analogy, but the same sort of thing is happening with our nation's health care information technology. Most stakeholders work with proprietary systems that don't talk to each other. But the government has figured out that the widespread adoption of health care IT — which means there must be interoperability standards — has the potential to reduce health care costs and improve the quality of care.

To get the ball rolling, President Bush has called for electronic health records in a decade. And in a rare moment of unity from both parties, there is bipartisan support for legislation that would smooth the way for health care IT changes and make a national EHR network possible.

Yes, yes, I know. Many say health care, including this industry, must wait on physicians to move into the electronic age. But that might not be so unimaginable, either. CMS will soon announce a program that offers physicians low-cost EHR software, and recently, David Brailer, HHS' national coordinator for health IT, told lawmakers his office is looking at ways to offer the right combination of incentives to encourage doctors with smaller practices to invest in IT. Those moves could go a long way toward weaning the docs off paper.

Of course none of this will happen overnight, but it will happen. So what should you be doing about it? Right now, say experts in The eHealth Connection (page 20), you should concentrate on automation that can improve efficiency and profitability to keep your company competitive. They say you should think integration, think interoperability — and think ahead about how the systems you're investing in today for your home care business will function in the not-so-distant eHealth future.