Lowering the Cost of Care through Interoperability While Improving Quality

Dr. Michael Blackman joined Allscripts from McKesson and now provides medical leadership across the Allscripts CareInMotion suite. Passionate about looking for methods to improve care, he has worked with multiple hospitals and health systems to improve how EHRs are used to both advance patient outcomes and improve clinician workflow. Additionally, he was a leader in the early work to enable to widespread use of EPCS (electronic prescribing of controlled substances).

A former Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine, Dr. Blackman holds an MD from Brown University and an MBA from the University of Michigan. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital.

Mike McAfee, AVP Interoperability Connected Communities, contributed to this interview.

MB: The healthcare industry has been experiencing a substantial increase in costs over the past few years. Complying with continually changing and expanding government regulations isn't always intuitive and, commonly, organizations need help sorting it all out.

Additionally, there are daily challenges faced in the effort to lower costs across hospitals and health systems. Avoidable readmissions, administrative bottlenecks or coding inaccuracies, to name a few, directly contribute rising costs.

Unfortunately, if information doesn't flow cleanly that only makes it more difficult to successfully address many of the issues organizations need to solve to continue providing quality care across the continuum.

MB: The simple answer: Interoperability is an underlying tool to help create a seamless workflow and build a foundation to advance healthcare. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that, depending on one's perspective, we're either in or moving toward a value-based market—the more we can turn data into useful information for the clinician at the point of care, the better the chance of improving the quality while also lowering the cost of care for the organization. Providing the ability to more easily share information across the continuum will undoubtedly help strengthen an organization's core efficiencies.

MB: Beyond the benefits for the patient, interoperability will deliver benefits to organizations struggling to manage the immense amount of data coming out of complex health ecosystems. To help make sense of all this information—not just clinically, but also operationally—interoperable systems can enable health systems to achieve better outcomes and lower costs.

For example, interoperable systems can provide clinicians access to recent lab results, no matter their source, which can reduce unnecessary repeat testing. Access to comprehensive medication and allergy information can potentially reduce preventable adverse drug events, especially when the patient is unable to provide information themselves. More detailed information can enable more comprehensive treatment plans and can affect both clinical and financial measures, such as readmission rates. Another benefit is the resulting increase in productivity. Without having to pull reports from multiple systems, organizations can see a rise in its operational efficiencies.

MB: There will always be the need to connect disparate systems to gather patient information, so forward-looking hospitals and health systems are investing in solutions that make that process as seamless as possible. Streamlining processes—clinically and operationally—will help bring the cost of care down simply by, for example, alleviating scheduling bottlenecks and improving decision making.

As we look to the future of interoperability and how it can help manage the cost of care, we need to focus on bringing real-world relevance to industry terms, including “AI,” “cloud-based,” “clinical decision support” and “machine learning.” When these concepts and technologies are put into practice, they become more meaningful and will serve as workflow efficiency boosters for clinicians and entire organizations. This will aid in reducing the cost of care.

As interoperability shifts from being a theoretical goal for healthcare organizations to a practical necessity managing the cost of care, quality improvements should be enabled as well. Interoperability will evolve and get smarter, and will eventually improve the health of entire populations.

Learn more about how Allscripts is helping lower the cost of care.