A quick glance at Twitter Tuesday afternoon showed several things: Health IT is great. Health IT is terrible. Consumers have unprecedented access to their health records. Healthcare organizations haven’t done enough to give consumers access to records.
Today, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology tweeted this infographic to illustrate that nearly two-thirds of of healthcare providers in the U.S. provided online patient access to EHRs in 2014, up from just 10 percent a year earlier.
Just a couple of lines down in my Twitter feed was a link to a story in CIO magazine about a Nielsen Strategic Health Perspectives report from last week. That study found a “significant disconnect” between what consumers expect from health IT and what healthcare providers are actually delivering.
There also seems to be a significant disconnect between what the official numbers say and what is really happening between patients and providers. Perhaps that’s why MedCity News life sciences reporter Meghana Keshavan tweeted this from the Exponential Medicine conference in San Diego:
"Electronic medical records are such garbage," says @jdudley. "It's sparse, and biased toward billing." #EMR #HealthIT #mhealth #xmed
— Meghana Keshavan (@megkesh) November 10, 2015
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The comments, by the way, came from Joel Dudley, director of biomedical informatics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
Is anyone else as confused as we are about all these divergent viewpoints?
Photo: Bigstock
