The National Institutes of Health has awarded a research grant to a HealthPartners Research Foundation team to build and deploy an EHR-based clinical decision support system intended to reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke in patients. The team will use the $3.7 million grant over five years to study "Prioritized Clinical Decision Support to Reduce Cardiovascular Risk."
Given the federal incentive programs for health IT adoption, this research grant news highlights the fact that it's a great time for clinical researchers to advance health IT in their quest to improve the quality of healthcare delivery. The money is flowing and industry stakeholders need to take advantage of it.
The free market will develop its own solutions, but it's also important for clinical research teams from universities and major healthcare systems to be a part of the innovation of health IT. Particularly for healthcare systems, they're in the field, seeing these healthcare issues every day. Universities are equipped with research resources and the brain power. An injection of grants will accelerate these studies.
We face rising healthcare issues, as the population ages and obesity rates continue to skyrocket. Whether the provider shortfall is contained or continues to grow, the industry will be ill equipped to handle the growing volume of patients and their diseases. Health IT is not a panacea, but properly developed and implemented, and with proper training and maintenance, it can help alleviate the provider supply and demand problem, help streamline the delivery of healthcare and make an impact on quality of care.
It all begins with bright minds and some research grants. Keep that money flowing. One hopes that when the grant money is gone, we have real-world tools and technologies to practice 21st century healthcare.
Patty Enrado blogs daily at EHRWatch.com.
