Conference attendees given lessons in IT’s three III’s
By DON LONG
Healthcare InfoTech Managing Editor
ATLANTA At this week’s gathering of the National Managed Health Care Congress (NMHCC), held at the sprawling World Congress Center, a reporter picked up his name tag in the press room and headed out to the exhibits, making one of his first stops at the booth of Healtheon (Santa Clara, CA). In a conversation with one of the Healtheon people there, she promised to send the reporter some company information. Reaching out, she pulled his nametag out of its holder and swiped it through a card reader.
The nametag was an ATM-type card. And the Healtheon rep proceeded to match the reporter’s name with e-mailed pre-registration information automatically entered into a computer. Walking away, the reporter was pretty sure he’d get the company info most certainly by e-mail.
Appropriately, this scenario mirrored the main themes of the many presentations and company exhibits at this gathering of about 8,500 managed care and other healthcare providers. Those themes were: information, integration and the Internet, all pointing to the most important current change environment of healthcare.
In a paper world, of course, the three R’s may still rule. But in an IT world, the three I’s reign, and that’s a reality managed care is learning is increasingly important to its survival.
The swipe card and computer database system provided what one exhibitor stated this relatively new healthcare enterprise is all about. "Managed care is information," she said, an insight that helps to define what place IT should have in the industry..
But while the health industry has more information in particular, more information about its consumers than any other U.S. industry, that information isn’t used, according to Daniel Proctor, of Passport Communications (Brentwood, TN), one of the conference IT track presenters (see accompanying story). This translates to a lack of consumer confidence in hospitals and a lack of physician confidence in managed care.
Healthcare providers don’t know how to get to the information they do have, and "that’s what we can help them do," said several exhibitors. Or IT can transform masses of paper into digitized formats simply to save money and labor hours, according to Nathan Russell, marketing manager of GTESS (Richardson, TX), a show exhibitor that specializes in this work.
But the information on the swipe card and the information in the computer database have to be combined. Thus, the exhibit floor had a significant representation from integrators, all promoting their methods of combining disparate information from disparate sources: regulators and legislators, payors and providers, patients and physicians.
All of this is further complicated by the speed of industry consolidation, necessitating the merger of different legacy systems. Add to this the ever-present, and much-dreaded, upgrade. But, according Rob Graff of Enterworks (Ashburn, VA), though companies may get rid of some of their legacy systems, "they can’t get rid of their heritage." Graff’s company focuses on taking the overload of heterogeneous information and making it homogeneous. And many firms in the exhibit offered products to "drill down," allowing healthcare decision-makers to "think globally" and "act locally" (to use just some of the terms buzzing around the exhibit hall).
The third I the Internet clearly is what is bringing it all together, the many conference presenters hammered home, not just by integrating information, but by delivering it quickly.
Thus the Internet appeared either as a dominate theme or a recurring IT sub-topic throughout four speaker tracks offered during the four-day gathering, and interactively highlighted by NMHCC’s use of the name tag/swipe card. But managed care is about helping patients, not reporters or exhibit-goers, of course. A better example of the three I’s in action was offered at the conference by Dan Emig, marketing manager for SMS (Malvern, PA), who described a disease management effort being carried out by West Jersey Managed Care (WJMC) in cooperation with SMS, Intel and Hummanicare.
Emig said WJMC is following the progress of 300 diabetic patients who are using home PCs to provide daily documentation of their health status. This information is then sent via Internet to their physicians, who integrate this data into their own charts. They then can provide better disease management guidance via e-mail back to the patient.
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