Congress is out of town on a state / district work period this week leading up to Easter and Passover. Here’s a link to the Week in Congress’s report on last week’s actions on the Hill.
The FEHBlog was encouraged by reading this MD Magazine report that “51% of [American College of Physicians] ACP internal medicine physicians and subspecialists have at least 1 form of telehealth service available at their work.” As physician utilization of telehealth grows, the odds increase that patients who seek internist or pediatric telehealth care will receive care from a physician in the primary care practice that they use. That will curb the higher dispensing of antibiotics by telehealth providers recently noted here.
The Boston Globe’s STAT provided a Stanford Medical School professor the opportunity to discuss how electronic medical records can be improved. The FEHBlog heard the American Medical Association’s then President-elect express dismay that the government did not solicit medical profession comment on the development of electronic medical record “meaningful use” standards before shelling out $34 billion to popularize those government approved systems.
Not surprisingly, the good doctor’s number 1 wish is for EMR interoperability. The FEHBlog was encouraged o hear a talk two weeks ago about a developing interoperability technology called the Da Vinci project that would us HL7 code transmitted through what’s known as an FHIR server to connect health plan and provider systems to better coordinate patient/member care. Health Data Management informs us that
Kansas City-based Cerner has embraced the latest version of HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources [FHIR] standard to encourage third-party developers to build apps on top of its platforms. By adopting FHIR Release 4, the normative version of the interoperability standard, Cerner contends that it is positioned at the “leading edge” in creating healthcare apps and opening its application programming interfaces (APIs) to developers to foster innovation.
Da Vinci is one such API.