By Mitzi G. Cardenas
A level one trauma center in Kansas City, Missouri, Truman Medical Centers (TMC) treats nearly 113,000 individual patients each year. More than 30 percent of our patients have a behavioral health issue and more than 70 percent have one or more chronic conditions. We are the largest WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) provider in Missouri, ensuring healthcare access to vulnerable families and children. To provide the best care to our complex patients, we need to be able to receive and share health information about their medications and history.
Many of the patients TMC manages suffer from chronic illness. Treating those patients requires medical management with pharmacies and doctors' offices, as well as disease education. It also requires connecting with our local healthcare institutions to make sure everyone is on the same page. When transmitting medical information is difficult due to systems not talking to one another, patient care isn't as efficient as it should be.
Today's technology makes it hard to share medical data. At TMC, we have more than 55 connections outside the institution where we need to transmit health data information. In order to align our technology with these outside connections, we hire highly skilled employees. Making sure this important information is received consumes significant time, but is necessary to meet regulatory reporting requirements and allow data sharing with labs and insurance companies, among others.
Healthcare providers, technology vendors, and the government must work together to make it easier and less expensive to share the information patients and providers need. This concept of interoperability, or the ability to easily and securely share health information, is a subject of debate in the District of Columbia. The nation's healthcare system has a lot to benefit from achieving interoperability. That's why I chaired the American Hospital Association interoperability working group. Working alongside hospital chief executive officers, chief information officers, and clinical leaders, we developed a report that outlines our priorities for policymakers as they continue to develop a solution in the nation's capital.
The current system nationwide makes information sharing very difficult with costly and inefficient work-arounds, which is why the need for progress is urgent. All stakeholders need to work together so that technology supports real-time access to clinical information needed for care. The federal government has created a "seal of approval" certification program for vendors of electronic health records, but even certified EHRs don't support all of our information sharing needs. We know that a big part of the problem is that different vendors provide different technology to different providers with different standards, making data sharing expensive and complex. We need a more active approach from the government on testing these technologies.
TMC has invested heavily in technology to support patient care, patient safety and ensure the highest quality of care can be delivered to our patients. Interoperability in Kansas City and the nation is sorely needed to do the right thing for our patients and make sure the funds invested in health information technology are well-spent and effective. As Congress and the Department of Health and Human Services considers interoperability, they ought to keep these priorities and patients in mind.
Mitzi G. Cardenas serves as CIO and senior vice president of strategy, business development and technology for Truman Medical Centers, a two-hospital, not-for-profit health system based in Kansas City, Missouri.