The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions released a new report last week on the current state and future of medical homes and identified health IT as an important component to integrating and coordinating care, which is so central to medical homes.
This should come as no surprise to anyone in the industry. You can't coordinate care in an efficient and timely manner for a vast group of patients through paper records. Implementing health IT, particularly EHRs, is a front-end investment that will prove its worth in the long run.
The federal incentives for the meaningful use of health IT are driving the current rise in implementation of EHRs. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) is looking to medical homes as a way of delivering quality care in an efficient, cost-effective way. The two are converging, and healthcare providers should see both pieces of legislation as helping each other meet their goals. The upfront cost of deploying an EHR will serve both purposes, which is always a good thing when you can leverage investments for multiple initiatives.
While physician adoption has been a historical challenge, both pieces of legislation should make inroads to this barrier. Meaningful use of EHRs and transitioning to a patient-centered medical home, which is being pushed by the federal government and payers, will force healthcare providers to finally get on board. The industry as a whole is moving in this direction. It cannot be stopped. If you don't participate in a payer-sponsored medical home initiative, you won't get paid or won't receive the bonuses or benefits when goals such as better clinical outcomes are met.
It's hard to see what could stop the movement cold. It's the cost of doing business in the industry. Medical homes will be a prevalent approach to caring for patients in the near future, and rightly so. And health IT will be there to enable medical homes' success.
Photo by 4Cheungs courtesy of Creative Commons license.
