On left is Mr. Peter Salgo, MD, associate director of surgical intensive care at Presbyterian Hospital in New York.
ORLANDO – There is "no distinction between information management and healthcare," said Peter Salgo, MD, associate director of surgical intensive care at Presbyterian Hospital in New York, in his rousing presentation at AHIMA on Tuesday. And the people who know how to synthesize, store, and integrate medical information will lead the massive healthcare changes of the 21st century.
Indeed, said Salgo, a television personality and healthcare futurist, what is a physician but "essentially an information synthesizer?" Not for nothing are many docs known for their excellent memories and near-total recall.
And in healthcare, these days "memory is something we have in great supply. We can fill CPUs with memory." And the data and IT professionals who will do that are key to the future health of the healthcare system, said Salgo.
"You are on the forefront of change," he told the audience. "You will make the difference. It's through your influence in the way information is managed. Even by grinding through CPT codes, you're creating a database that we can mine later."
On those and countless other issues, HIM professionals are key, said Salgo. "Nobody's going anywhere without the folks in this room."
There were many laugh lines in Salgo's speech.
He parodied the dinosaur-like doctors who "write a note in Word, print it out, dump it in a folder and think they've enter the electronic age. These people might as well use quills and parchment."
He guffawed at the contention "that the EMR is going to balance the healthcare budget," running down a list of politicians who essentially claimed "that the EMR would save the government $77 billion a year, starting the first year. I'm assuming that year is … now." That money can be saved – "long-term," he said, "but not before the midterm election."
He poked fun at some of the foibles of manual and voice-recognition based transcription – wondering about the poor soul who's afflicted with "chirpies."
But despite the jokes, Salgo's speech had a seriousness of purpose.
He urged a "common language" among EMRs that can bridge the gaps between legacy and next-generation programs.
He requested technology that would allow for a "simple link" that leads from the record to X-rays or lab results with just a click, and EMRs featuring improved lab reporting standards: "I want graphs. I want trends. I want it to show me out-of-norm findings."
He wondered, "where was it written that the only way to make a system secure is to make it so difficult to log on that nobody uses it?" And he pointed out that if passwords continue to have to be be 22 characters long, with letters and numbers, needing to be changed every few weeks, "people are going to write them on Post-it notes" and defeat their purpose entirely.
And he railed against the scourge of "note creep," where docs simply cut and past previous assessments into a patient's record, vastly undermining its efficiency and effectiveness.
"I have reviewed 6,000-page charts, of which two thirds was regurgitated garbage," he said. Worse, some physicians are "printing it out! It's not enough that it's taking up silicon and magnetic domain, they're putting it on tree bark."
Resolving those and other problems are imperative, said Salgo. "It can be done. And you're just the folks to do it."
He went on: "Do we have an EMR now? Yes. Does it work? Sort of. Does it need to be better? Yup. Will it be better? Yup. Tomorrow? Absolutely not! And are we going to save $77 billion with it? Nope.
"See why we need you?"
News By:
HealthCare IT News