“Health IT provides new opportunities to engage patients and caregivers and can empower patients to learn and communicate more easily about their health, engage in shared decision making, and manage their care in convenient and meaningful ways. Market innovations and government policies should soon allow patients to combine information from various sources to create a single resource with all their current and historical health information.
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Health IT is also important for advancing a learning health system that uses knowledge gained as part of the care experience to promote continuous improvement and innovation. As rich and diverse sources of digital data become widely available for research purposes and analytic tools become increasingly powerful and sophisticated, researchers and clinicians will have opportunities to quickly and efficiently generate scientific evidence. Making high-quality evidence available to patients and clinicians will help them make informed decisions that maximize benefits and minimize risks and ultimately lead to improved individual and community health.
Health IT stakeholders can build on this momentum by continuing to work together to address vexing issues of interoperability, usability, privacy, security, and data stewardship. Given the sensitive nature of patient data, evolving privacy and security policies will require particular attention. Clinicians who serve vulnerable communities will continue to require support. Health IT should also support practitioners’ efforts to work across the care continuum and with partners in other sectors to address social determinants of health and develop interventions that improve community health and well-being.
We also believe that health IT should be easier to use and capable of integrating and displaying information in meaningful, actionable ways. Health IT developers could make the digital information they steward easily accessible to third-party developers to spur innovation in the technology marketplace.”
In the preceding quote from the Perspective article in The New England Journal of Medicine September 7, 2017 edition entitled “The HITECH Era and the Path Forward” (http://bit.ly/2eK5j4v) by Vindell Washington, M.D., M.H.C.M., Karen DeSalvo, M.D., M.P.H., Farzad Mostashari, M.D., and David Blumenthal, M.D., M.P.P. (all former national coordinators for health IT at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) of the USA Department of Health and Human Services); the authors posit the following:
- “Health IT is also important for advancing a learning health system that uses knowledge gained as part of the care experience to promote continuous improvement and innovation.”
- “Health IT should also support practitioners’ efforts to work across the care continuum and with partners in other sectors to address social determinants of health and develop interventions that improve community health and well-being.”
- “[H]ealth IT should be easier to use and capable of integrating and displaying information in meaningful, actionable ways.”
An information technology (IT) solution compliant with the Cloud Healthcare Appliance Real-Time Solution as a Service reference architecture (CHARTSaaS RA) would facilitate medical learning advances, clinical intervention development and creation of actionable information by enabling healthcare provider subject matter experts (SMEs) to create IT “apps” for clinical cognitive support. Such apps could automate such critical clinical processes as the complete, accurate and timely shift-change handoff communications with minimal cost and complexity, and with little or no dependence on the IT staff or system resources.
CHARTSaaS-built apps would operate as systems of engagement with professional providers and their patients to leverage the on-premise legacy systems of record referred to as electronic health record (EHR) or hospital information systems (HIS) using secure intelligent interoperability. Furthermore, they would facilitate automation such problematic and error-prone use cases as differential diagnosis and treatment planning, and alarm/alert fatigue mitigation. Since such apps would be easily modifiable, they would facilitate both compliance with the accreditation standards of The Joint Commission that govern continuous process improvement and accrual of medical knowledge in a digitally based operational mode. And all these capabilities are facilitated by the fact that CHARTSaaS as a cloud-based solution as a service, designed for use in a hybrid cloud environment.
Please validate these CHARTSaaS RA-related propositions to your own satisfaction by reading the white paper at http://bit.ly/2vmK1Rx, viewing the tutorials posted on YouTube (http://bit.ly/2sVajvS and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5OtbCCDNLs) and also by reviewing the details of CHARTSaaS™ and the CHARTSaaS RA™ in these presentations:
https://mix.office.com/embed/19g5mpp3f6qkx
https://mix.office.com/embed/1bp3nuiwdjk86
https://mix.office.com/watch/o2y82frum3lt
Healthcare providers will benefit significantly from appreciating and then applying a CHARTSaaS RA-compliant IT solution. To do so will mitigate medical mistakes (currently the third leading cause of patient deaths. per Makaray and Daniel (http://bit.ly/1rtW6Sa); thereby minimizing patient adverse events and optimizing clinical case outcomes while maximizing the cost-effectiveness of care and treatment, and also accelerating the accrual and facilitating the application of medical knowledge.