by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | May 15, 2014
From the May 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Another thing Medical X-Ray Consultants’ Mangrum believes will be useful is communication between hospital systems. “Currently, if a patient goes to a hospital in Minneapolis and the next day goes to a hospital in Chicago, the chances of those two electronic medical records effectively interfacing with each other is very minimal,” Mangrum says. “In the best case scenario, one hospital system will fax the information to the next. This system has marginal effectiveness. I think that Meaningful Use is going to try to address that problem by requiring hospitals to interface with one another. This will be especially important in the field of radiology so as to reduce unnecessary duplication of imaging studies.”
Image sharing
There is an imaging aspect of the meaningful use program, but not necessarily for radiologists, Hirschorn says.
“No matter what kind of doctor you are, you must, if you take a picture, generate a radiology report,” Hirschorn says. “There’s no rule that says you have to be a radiologist. If an orthopedist wants to interpret it themselves, they are at liberty to do so. Most don’t take the risk, because it’s not their trade.”
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The reports are part of the health record that must be transferred. The question is, does image sharing fall into the Meaningful Use criteria? The simple answer so far is “no,” Hirschorn says.
“Image sharing itself, strictly speaking, isn’t included,” Hirschorn says. “I think it should be included. It’s horrible that I should subject someone to an additional dose of radiation because I don’t have the first images. This goes on every day. We know that if you have image sharing, you reduce imaging.”
Clinical decision support
Something that is already part of Meaningful Use, with the radiology aspect gaining momentum, is clinical decision support. Making sure primary care doctors order the right tests, based on a patient’s profile, is a big step forward in stopping unnecessary tests from being performed and reducing patients’ exposure to radiation, doctors say.
“You want to make it useful, you need to put it in the point of care,” Hirschorn says. “The major EMR players have to be willing to talk and bake this into their product. The EMR providers have their hands full. They are paying attention because the government is likely to require it.”
In February, Halabi participated in a discussion with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services about clinical decision support for radiology, and the pros and cons of all the different forms of that support. The fact that Medicare is looking at clinical decision support is a big deal, he says.
