For healthcare policymakers, the perfect world would probably include a healthcare sector in which providers of all sizes worked together to make the transition to new HIT as quickly and efficiently as possible.
But based on comments coming out of a conference in Florida this week, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The conference is the Spring Summit, sponsored by the Institute for Health Technology Transformation, that is being held this week in Fort Lauderdale.
As one physician at the conference sums up the emerging conflict between large and small healthcare providers, “physicians must be able to exchange information with hospitals, but they (hospitals) do not want to play. We need to change the mindset from confrontation to collaboration.”
The problem seems to revolve around the inability of small practices to meet the challenges presented by the transition to HIT as readily as large practices or hospitals can. Indeed, some observers “have suggested that the small physician practice is rapidly becoming an endangered species, as physicians determine they don’t have the resources to survive on their own and hospitals and health networks find it easier to absorb physicians into their organization rather than deal with them as independent entities.”
But one executive speaking at the conference claimed that “healthcare providers are overlooking the importance of small physician practices and independent networks, particularly as they try to advance health information exchange initiatives and seek federal incentive grants.”
Naturally, the comments from one conference don’t prove the existence of a nationwide trend, but they do make us wonder if the speakers have identified an issue that should be of concern to policymakers.
So we’re looking for comments below from readers who are on the front lines of the transition. Is the move toward new HIT endangering the tradition of small, independent healthcare practices? If so, what can or should be done to ensure that doctors who want both to modernize their IT and remain independent can do so?
Jeff Rowe blogs daily at Priming the Pump.
