In the couple of years since I’ve gotten to know him, I’ve often found myself leaving a room with Neil Calman — saying to myself, “Wow! That really captures the issue in front of us.” Or, sometimes it’s “If only we could clone Neil — or simply replicate his leadership — we could eliminate most of our country’s health care problems.” Neil is a primary care physician who is CEO and Co-Founder of IxAction Alliance member, the Institute for Family Health, a network of 17 federally qualified health centers in New York.

In Friday’s post on this blog, I mentioned the questions he posed for meaningful health information exchange that move the ball forward substantially. In the past, I’ve cited other wisdom from Neil, such as:

• HIT vendors’ responsibility to teach people how to use HIT products meaningfully
• The connection in HIT evolution between quality and equality
• His proclamation that training his own clinicians on effective HIT use was about helping them to become (in his words) “information therapists”
• (And from the same blog post) HIT implementation with his safety-net population was approached with the goal of building trust with their patients

At last week’s HIT Policy Committee meeting, Neil made another comment that triggered a light bulb flickering on over my head. As concerns over the implications of HIT meaningful use definitions on provider liability swirled, Neil raised a fascinating point. We are getting close to an understanding around a new “standard of care in the community” related to the meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs). Neil suggested that soon “if an error in care that could have been prevented” by a meaningfully used EHR, there is in effect a new standard of care to which all providers will be held accountable.

The literature has demonstrated that little relationship exists between actual malpractice and legal action. This is true in both directions. Many horrible and preventable medical errors never are punished while many lawsuits are settled where negligence may not be the issue.

What the literature tells us is that most medical malpractice lawsuits arise because of poor advance communication resulting in a mismatch between patient and clinician expectations. Effective information therapy (Ix) that leads to informed choice in advance of medical and surgical procedures can dramatically reduce the likelihood of malpractice suits being filed.

More importantly, by meaningfully using HIT to deliver Ix, clinicians can dramatically reduce the likelihood of committing medical errors or having consumers unprepared for the clinical realities that confront them. And that’s a standard of care for our community.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 8:44 am and is filed under EHRs, Health Care Reform, Inside the Beltway, Participatory Medicine, Safety-Net Populations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.