From the August 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


He acknowledges there is software available to allow a user to just view CT images for example, but the ability to tweak what information is presented is very basic for now. “The search engines of the past used to come up with maybe 100 results and you’d have to go through 75 before you found what you needed to find,” he says.

Patient expectations versus quality of care
With reimbursements tied to patient satisfaction, it’s incredibly important for physicians to have face-time with patients. Patients expect their doctors to interact and connect. But there’s a juggling act involved. “For radiologists, the more time they have their eyes on the image, the more likely they are to make a good diagnosis,” says Piraino. “Even for a primary care doctor — if you have a 15 minute appointment and you have to spend half of that time looking at the computer, you have less time to interact with the patient.
Yet, without spending time reviewing the record, some critical point may be overlooked, jeopardizing the patient’s care. On the other hand, taking too much time with records and too little time with the patient may lead to bad feedback and a decrease in reimbursement. That’s why Piraino has a message for manufacturers: “The easier you can make it for me to see the relevant information, the less I have to worry about doing it right, the more I can be concerned about doing right by the patient.”

Out of school with lots to learn
Piraino points out that medicine in general is a pretty conservative industry, with lots of conservative individuals involved in it. “Just because it’s new, doesn’t mean it’s better,” he says. “As a physician, if there’s a new treatment, you would expect several studies to show that it’s more effective than a previous treatment. That’s the type of conservative mentality that information technology providers encounter as well.”

The challenge for manufacturers isn’t just presented by those who are old hands in health care. Medical technology students coming out of school are also going to expect more from medical IT companies, according to Piraino. These students have grown up with Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook. They’re used to an easy interface and see software working in ways that make sense. They’re going to question why health IT companies aren’t delivering the same sort of products.

Piraino offers some sympathy for those companies. “IT manufacturers have to get a lot of FDA approval before they can go to market, so there’s a bigger hurdle to getting new things out in medical IT than commercial IT. To be honest, there’s a lot more money to be made by Apple than a health care IT company.”

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