If money is widely considered as “Wealth”, there were many
innovations done to safeguard the wealth. Supported hugely by technology, such
innovations have created an avenue for the mass customers to track their wealth
and feel a sense of higher security. Starting from the revolution in the simple
bank account management to evolution of technologies to simplify the
complicated equity and mutual fund management, technology has really shown its
true colour in creating value to the community. Understanding financial market
has had never been so easy without the introduction of innovative technology.
The concept of health account is the same as your bank account.
The way bank account creates, holds and manages all of your finance
requirements; the health account would create your health records, holds all
the records for retrieval and would help to manage your health in a better and
more effective way. Many times there is a strategic approach gap between health
account and the Electronic Health Records (EHR).
Many of the hospitals have initiated the efforts in this direction
which is often termed as EHR. EHR systems enable hospitals to store and
retrieve detailed patient information to be used by health care providers, and
sometimes patients, during a patient’s hospitalization, over time, and across
care settings. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) calls EHRs,
“the next step in continued progress of health care that can strengthen the
relationship between patients and clinicians.” Even with a huge perceived
utility of EHR, the implementation is very low. Although EHR penetration is
growing at 13.5% in India many hospitals are struggling to deal with
challenges like limited knowledge and application of IT in the desired area,
shortage of trained manpower, sizable initial investments, physician and staff
buy-in, training to the hospital staff etc.
While the challenges are genuine for the successful implementation
of EHR, I personally feel there is an issue in the approach of implementation
of EHR. Almost all the strategic papers on EHR state that the value derivation
for the hospital operation, quality of care for the said hospitals. However, it
has not spelled out the value being created for the patients, thus the demand
component from the patients are completely ignored. Positioning of the EHR from
patient perspective would definitely help in bringing the EHR in fast track.
Another strategic issue of EHR is the lack of integrated approach.
Most of the times the strategy revolves around the hospital and the Information
Technology (IT) solution providers, leaving other major players like diagnostic
centers, pharmacy, insurance companies and training institutes and consultants.
It must bring them into the fold if the EHR in India would make an impact in
the health care industry.
The EHR must be people centric. The awareness programme would also
be initiated so that the patient feels he is empowered and a considerable
amount of value is being provided through the health account. This may be
powered by issue of the health cards, which can be resembles like credit and
debit cards and also functions like them as well. The way the bank accounts are
tracked for any transaction and financial status, the people with health
account can track their health related transactions like various diagnostic
parameters, annual health check up report and take a holistic view of the
overall health status. The account must be done on a web based application, so
that customers can access their account any-time any-where. This would enable
the patient to do the “Internet Health”.
The hospitals here are synonymous to banks for opening of health
accounts. Hospitals must take a lead in bringing more value addition services
and provide integrated services like consulting, IPD, diagnostic services,
pharmacy etc. In such case the functionalities of health account become more
effective as it does not require integrating other service providers except the
insurance.
Healthcare in India is at the cross roads. Although hospitals and
health care industry has taken stride to bring innovations in using technology
for scaling up in the operation, improvement in the clinical services, the
optimal use of technology is way far. The patient centric and partnership based
approach would bring the desired result with the healthcare customers
experiencing the true use of information technology by internet health.
The writer is Dr Biranchi Narayan Jena, Director, Institute of
Health Management Research(IHMR), Bengaluru.
