[rninformatics]

March 20, 2008

Clinical IT Can Boost Chronic Disease Care, Providers Say

Clinical IT can help boost patient care, reduce costs and expedite clinical studies, health care providers said at a conference on the challenges of treating patients with chronic illnesses in Washington, D.C., Modern Healthcare reports.

The conference was sponsored by the Partnership for Quality Care, a coalition of 12 health care groups representing providers and labor unions. The conference discussed ways to reduce costs through IT, eliminate health disparities and encourage patients to share more responsibility for their health care.

Eran Bellin -- vice president of clinical IT research and development at Emerging Health Information Technology, a wholly owned subsidiary of Montefiore Medical Center in New York -- said providers need software that enables them to track patient outcomes and results, and aggregate patient data.

Bellin said Montefiore's "Clinical Looking Glass" application addresses those challenges and allows for quality improvement studies to be "executed in minutes, not weeks."

Linda Beckman, Northern California labor coordinator for Kaiser Permanente's KP HealthConnect electronic health record system, noted that the EHR system has reduced hospital medication errors. KP HealthConnect is the largest civilian deployment of EHRs, Modern Healthcare reports.

The Partnership for Quality Care plans to release a report summarizing the presentations at the conference, as well as chronic care applications from other providers (Lubell, Modern Healthcare, 3/20).