Vermont: Despite $70 million investment, health IT systems a long way from prime time - "Problems are appropriate"

Preliminary note:  This post is rich with hyperlinks.  At minimum I recommend opening them in another window and at least scanning their contents - SS

No surprises in this article, including an amorality alien to the healing professions, but common in technology circles:

Despite $70 million investment, health IT systems a long way from prime time
VTDigger.org
Andrew Nemethy
July 18, 2012

The state’s efforts to digitize the world of health information, a costly multi-year endeavor that is approaching a $70 million pricetag, got a lousy diagnosis Tuesday.

Instead of creating cost efficiency and improving payment flow to doctors and treatment for patients, it’s creating stress and a lot of headaches for physicians, according to both lawmakers and state officials overseeing the effort. [It's also creating increased risk for patients, a factor - the most crucial factor - rarely mentioned in articles such as this - ed.]

Money, of course, grows on trees, and physicians, hospitals and government have nothing better to do with $70 million than conduct experiments on patients with alpha and beta software ...

There's the usual excuses from the usual actors:

But Health Information Technology (HIT) coordinator Hunt Blair said that’s to be expected considering the difficulty of the “incredibly challenging” task of getting such disparate groups as doctors, hospitals, other health care providers, insurance companies, the state and federal government on the same digital page.

Let alone (per Social Informatics) the organizational and sociological challenges of implementing any new information or communications technology (ICT), that's somewhat akin to saying it's hard to get people to consume arsenic as an aphrodisiac.  Not mentioned is the deplorable state of health IT in terms of quality, safety, usability, unregulated nature etc.

“We’re talking about an extremely complex undertaking and I think it’s important to recognize the state of Vermont was way out in front,” Blair said.

“We’re on the bleeding edge,” he told a legislative Health Care Oversight Committee Tuesday at the Statehouse.

That prompted Sen. Claire Ayer, D-Addison, the panel’s chairwoman, to ask him to clarify if he meant “leading.”

He stuck with “bleeding.”

"Bleeding edge?"

Aside from the very poor choice of terms, this attitude is the polar opposite of the culture of "first, do no harm."  It is not a clinician's attitude.  It is an attitude of someone who seems to forget that patients are at the receiving end of the "bleeding edge" (which usually implies a rocky course) technology:

Bleeding edge technology is a category of technologies incorporating those so new that they could have a high risk of being unreliable and lead adopters to incur greater expense in order to make use of them.  The term bleeding edge was formed as an allusion to the similar terms "leading edge" and "cutting edge". It tends to imply even greater advancement, albeit at an increased risk of "metaphorically cutting until bleeding" because of the unreliability of the software or other technology.The phrase was originally coined in an article entitled "Rumors of the Future and the Digital Circus" by Jack Dale, published in Editor & Publisher Magazine, February 12, 1994.

Wonderful.

Considering the risks to patients, this claim brings to mind the definition I posted of the health IT Ddulite ("Luddite", the common canard against cautious doctors, with the first four letters reversed):

Ddulite:  Hyper-enthusiastic technophiles who either deliberately ignore or are blinded to technology's downsides, ethical issues, and repeated local and mass failures.

On the other hand, did critic VT Sen. Kevin Mullin read my Drexel website on health IT failure and mismanagement?

That doesn’t surprise Sen. Kevin Mullin, R-Rutland, who had tough questions about the state’s effort to oversee and promote use of electronic medical health records and a statewide health information exchange.

“I hear genuine frustration from providers who are spending time and resources trying to modernize and make their offices more efficient, and prepare for the future, and yet every one of them feels like they’ve been burned,” he said.

“Basically we’re not getting any results for these millions and millions of dollars that have been pumped into IT (information technology),” he said after the meeting.

“We should be a lot further along,” he said. “I just don’t think the leadership’s in place.”

He's on the right track, but I'm not sure Vermont (or any state government) really understands what levels of leadership are truly needed, e.g., as outlined by ONC a few years ago here.

More excuses:

... Mark Larson, commissioner of the Vermont Health Access Department and a former House representative from Burlington, oversees management of Vermont’s publicly funded health insurance programs and the effort on digital medical records and a new medical information exchange.

... Larson told lawmakers he hears the same message they do, that there’s “a lot of confusion in the field.” He said that is an inevitable part of the complex process.

“These are not systems where you just plug that in and they work perfectly on day one,” he said. “Problems are appropriate along the path to get where we want." [I note this is an implicit admission that experimentation is being performed - ed.]


“We just have to work through that,” he said.

"Problems are appropriate?"  ... Really?  In a mission critical field such as medicine?  That's a maddeningly reckless and cavalier ideology, to put it mildly.   In what other safety-critical domain would such a happy-go-lucky attitude that "problems are appropriate", outside of the laboratory, be tolerated? 

"We just have to work through that?" ... "Just work through that?"  Really?

That should be really easy,  just like the failed £12.7bn (~ US $20 billion) National Programme for IT (NPfIT) in the NHS, a program that went "Pffft" last year.

... Based on testimony Tuesday, the issues that medical practitioners and the industry face in digitizing information are familiar ones for anyone who deals with technology: Software that is problematic, digital files that don’t translate and can’t be read by other systems, lost time spent on technological issues that detract from what doctors are paid to do, which is treat their patients. [And create increased risk that leads to maimed or dead patients - ed.]

"Familiar to anyone who deals with technology?"  As in, say, mercantile/management computing that runs Walmart's stock inventory system, or the Post Office?  Is that an appeal to common practice of some type?  This brings to life my observation that there is an utter lack of recognition (either due to ignorance, or opportunism) that HIT systems are not business management systems that happen to be used by clinicians, they are virtual clinical tools (with all that implies) that happen to reside on computers.

How utterly amoral and alien to the ethics of medicine these attitudes are.  No regulation of the technology is in place.  No systematic postmarket surveillance of patient harm or death is conducted. 

Further, the literature on health IT is not entirely as optimistic and tolerant as the VT government.

Is the VT government aware of that literature?

Just a few specific examples - the National Research Council wrote that  "Current Approaches to U.S. Healthcare Information Technology are Insufficient", do not support clinician cognitive processes (then what, exactly, is health IT supposed to do?) and may result in harm. 

The ECRI Institute indicates health IT systems are among the top ten technology risks in healthcare.

Reports from the Joint Commission, FDA and AHRQ indicate that risk is known, but magnitude of risk unknown ("tip of the iceberg" per FDA).

A report from NIST indicates that usability is lacking and promotes "use error" (technology-promoted error, as opposed to "user error").

A report from IOM on safety of health IT states that:

... While some studies suggest improvements in patient safety can be made, others have found no effect. Instances of health IT–associated harm have been reported. However, little published evidence could be found quantifying the magnitude of the risk.

Several reasons health IT–related safety data are lacking include the absence of measures and a central repository (or linkages among decentralized repositories) to collect, analyze, and act on information related to safety of this technology. Another impediment to gathering safety data is contractual barriers (e.g., nondisclosure, confidentiality clauses) that can prevent users from sharing information about health IT–related adverse events. These barriers limit users’ abilities to share knowledge of risk-prone user interfaces, for instance through screenshots and descriptions of potentially unsafe processes. In addition, some vendors include language in their sales contracts and escape responsibility for errors or defects in their software (i.e., “hold harmless clauses”).

The committee believes these types of contractual restrictions limit transparency, which significantly contributes to the gaps in knowledge of health IT–related patient safety risks. These barriers to generating evidence pose unacceptable risks to safety.

(Institute of Medicine, 2012. Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care. PDF.  Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, pg. S-2.)

Human subjects protections?  Not needed here ... it's just one big, unconsented, happy $70 million medical experiment.

What is not mentioned, and either deliberately ignored or lost on these politicians, is the effects of this turmoil on patient care in terms of risk and adverse outcomes, and that being on the "bleeding edge" in this experimental technology is not desirable.  

Slow, skeptical and cautious approaches are essential.  Physician education on health IT risks and patient informed consent might be nice, too.

It seems mass social re-engineering experiments are fine, even if the consequences include wasted resources the healthcare delivery system can ill afford, physicians being distracted by major defects, and outcomes like baby deaths, adults suffocating at the bedside, and graveyards.

-- SS