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[…] want to make regular visits to the WHC site in your daily netizen travels. (I invite you to see my first whc blog entry commenting on rapid learning systems in health care.) Posted in Healthcare, Blog […]

I hope I didn’t seem cavalier when I cited the potential for regional and national sharing of EHR information for purposes of research. It is both clear and unfortunate that EHRs are being promoted and purchased as methods to improve the quality and efficiency of hospitals’ and physicians’ delivery of sickness care alone. There is great potential for EHRs in proactive health care, and many current proactive-health-focused physician practices, such as the MDVIP “retainer” practices, are already using the technology to improve patients’ health and reduce both their sickness and their use of sickness care. Check the website www.mdvip.com for examples of how much less sickness care their patients use. And there will clearly be lots of hurdles in pursuit of “rapid learning systems” bases on shared patient histories. But is seems to me a “consummation devoutly to be wished” at least.

Thanks for your comment Scott, and I would never think of your thoughtful post as cavalier. We both know there are a lot of hurdles to realizing the potential of large EHR databases. But that shouldn’t deter us, of course, in trying to conceptualize in a clear, public and iterative way what that potential could look like, and the value it offers. Also I did check out MDVIP. This is only the beginning, I think, of the new style ‘marketing of quality care’. I wonder if Porter et al. would see this as a movement towards the right kind of competition or more of the same. Anyway, I searched the MDVIP site for docs in Hawaii, and unfortunately — as is more often the case than I would like — we’re out of the loop.

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