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The Obama administration’s reforms created a golden age for digital healthcare entrepreneurs and investors alike.
Whatever your stance on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), there’s little doubt that it has been responsible for ushering into the U.S. healthcare system a new era of technology. The controversial law ignited an explosion of new digital health offerings, and set the entire healthcare system on a path of advancement that will continue to extend access and increase the quality of healthcare administration for years to come.
The ACA’s Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) provisions created tens of billions of dollars in incentives for healthcare providers to implement federally approved IT systems. These systems, known widely as electronic health records (EHRs), were key to healthcare reform and created the strongest platform to date for digital health innovation.
While EHRs faced significant barriers to adoption, namely resistance from physicians trained for years to document patients using pen and paper, they came with the promise of faster and more efficient care. For those not swayed by financial incentives and the improvement of patient care, the government baked in penalties for noncompliance.
Obamacare’s incentive scheme was strikingly effective. Today, 96 percent of hospitals across the country have adopted EHRs. In 2009, before the ACA had been passed, only 12 percent of hospitals had adopted them, reporting up-front cost and maintenance expense, uncertain return on investment and inconsistent IT systems as the biggest barriers to adoption.
Despite their rapid EHR adoption, healthcare providers have faced challenges along the way. Many EHR systems are not interoperable, preventing patients from seamlessly transitioning between different facilities and departments. Furthermore, security is a concern; 113 million individuals were affected by EHR breaches in 2015. Nonetheless, these challenges opened the door for a thriving ecosystem owing its existence to the ACA and President Obama: healthcare IT entrepreneurs.
Via Pharma Guy
But, is it on life support? According to a JAMA viewpoint article (http://sco.lt/6zlvUX):
"The financial and clinical benefits predicted from shifting to EHRs have also largely failed to materialize because of difficulties in interoperability, poor quality, and accuracy of the collected information; cost overruns associated with installation and operation of EHRs at many institutions; and ongoing privacy and security concerns that further increase operational costs.These features make the use of EHRs for research into the origins of disease, as proposed in the Precision Medicine Initiative, highly problematic.No clearly specified targets for either improved outcomes or reduced costs have been developed to assess the performance efficiency of EHRs. Although it is difficult to argue for a return to paper records, any claim of future transformation of the medical record should include well-defined accountability and review mechanisms. Otherwise, the health care system may become hostage, wasting increasing resources to continuously upgrade electronic technology without really helping patients."