The Link Between Email, Ix and Better Health Communication
By Josh Seidman | Popularity: 6%Much of the talk about the introduction of secure messaging (secure email) between clinicians and their patients revolves around convenience. There’s no doubt that it can greatly increase efficiency for both clinicians and patients.
The consumer argument is obvious, but I’m hearing the convenience factor more from clinicians as well lately–such as when a primary care physician in a busy community health center told me while I was shadowing him, “I wish the clinic made it possible for me to email with my patients. I would save so much time not trying to track down patients by phone, and almost all my patients have access to email.”
Not to diminish the convenience argument, but I’ve always been more interested in the health benefits that secure messaging offers. A good Associated Press/Washington Post article today highlighted both of these benefits.
In it, a 34-year-old woman from Milwaukee is quoted, “It makes sense to me to have the words laid out, to be able to re-read, to go back to it at a convenient time.”
In past blog posts, I’ve quoted the research that 40%-80% of everything a doctor tells a patient is completely forgotten by the time he or she gets home. Clearly, health communication can be greatly enhanced by any strategy that creates some lasting record to which the patient can return in order to extract the information he or she needs sometime down the road. That could be done through a secure message, an after-visit summary, or some other information prescription.
At some point, I think we’ll all wake up one day and realize that it was ludicrous that the US’s $2 trillion health care system still wasn’t utilizing these tools in the early 21st century. As Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet & American Life Project points out in the AP article, consumers are already using electronic tools in most other aspects of their lives.
How long will it take for these tools to be included into the norm of health care delivery?
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December 18th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
With all the progress with regards to a secure email solution your readers might not be aware of a solution that scales well and addresses the needs of Practices, Clinics, Hospital on all the day to day communications that keep practices and hospitals tied to phones and fax machines. This approach addresses the two most common objections of new technology applications namely “work flow” disruption and “cost”. Given the financial state of practices and hospitals today many of the suggested solutions carry significant price tags that cause intended users to balk and obfuscate. And the longer healthcare organizations wait the higher the price on the next application/solution seems to climb.
At the heart of the issue surrounding the practice and administration of healthcare is HIPAA and the requirement to protect ePHI, both at rest and in transit. This has been a contributing factor in failure of the healthcare industry to adopt the web and capture some of the cost saving and productivity gains that other industries have realized. “The revenue cycle management company Emdeon estimates that the health care industry could save more than $50 billion annually by using electronic processes. (Tennessean, Health Data Management.)”.
Yet the dialog surrounding Healthcare IT seldom focuses on the day to day administration of healthcare. The dialog seems to center on EHRs, DICOM or HL7 and E-prescribing. What about the level of communication between practices and their day to day business counter parties such as insurers, hospitals, labs etc and of course patients. Almost 70% of the consumers surveyed by the National Research Corporations Healthcare Market guide want to communicate with their physician online; an amazing number when you consider the survey touched 200,000 households.
. Implicit in the current dialog and focus on the subject of healthcare interoperability appears to be a sort of .com myopia. By that I mean the efforts almost universally suggest versions of a fire-walled ASP or centralized Database. Big companies are putting a lot of effort into creating the centralized asp that they will monetize with the revenue of users that are increasingly strapped financially.
The market could use a more fundamental approach to a solution. A solution that does not present the user with either/or choices. Some define cloud computing as anything an entity consumes outside the organizations firewall. The “cloud” is a reference to the internet. Cloud computing solutions offer a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities.
Max.MD has developed a “Cloud” solution to interoperability by creating a Secure Communication Platform(patent pending). at the Top Level Domain (TLD) level. .md Because Medicine is your Domain, was developed to help independent organizations communicate securely within the Domain with Zero chance for loss of ePHI. Those that register for the service can communicate with any other registrant in domain without any further encryption and externally ( meaning any address outside the .md domain) with a SendAnywhere capability for pennies per user per day.
This is an Omni-directional encrypted communication capability that can be added on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, and without retraining existing or new personnel or licensing new software. The solution integrates with any modern email client (Outlook, Mozilla, Blackberry etc.) and provides each organization a means to communicate securely anywhere over the internet. The suite of tools was designed to increase staff productivity, protect ePHI and comply with HIPAA requirements. Once information is captured in an electronic format it can be easily retransmitted or moved into other applications. This is a low cost, high productivity, scalable solution to improving office productivity for every type of healthcare organization. The solution works just as effectively and economically for organizations that are currently operating their own exchanges servers as the practices that have no IT staff. No legacy system issues in a fragmented market like healthcare is a significant positive.
Many day to day issues can be accomplished faster and more efficiently with this approach; E-referrals, E-meetings with SecureIM, resolving claims disputes that are normally done over the phone, Communicating Lab results to patients, or forwarding to another Doctor, pre-filling forms before a visit, sending care instructions both post op and pre-op or pre-visit and post visit, passing information from a practice to hospital, and even communicating with all the day to day business partners electronically and securely. Email is ubiquitous because it is efficient. For many practices the lost time to phone tag and faxing is astounding. This is an Omni-directional secure communication capability that also reinforces the brand identity of the user. There is no need to subordinate the brand to a third party provider (ASP) and the cost is affordable to even the smallest healthcare organization.
This solution was developed with the Doctor, Practice and Hospital and their businesses issues in mind. By improving the ability of Doctors, hospitals or any other healthcare organization to communicate electronically helps them begin to capture the productivity gains alluded to above. That they can do it for pennies per user per day is exactly the type of web solution they are entitled to.
Scott Finlay , Founder/CEO of Max.MD