Computational Technology for Effective Health Care Immediate Steps and Strategic Directions (2009) / Chapter Skim
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6 Recommendations
6 Recommendations
Pages 59-67
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From page 59... ...
Organizations face difficult economic decisions regarding whether to emphasize short-term financial gains relative to longer-term advantages wherein cost savings are associated with quality improvement. In addition, the acquisition processes of many health care provider organizations are not often compatible with the development and deployment of future health care IT systems that provide cognitive support and are evolvable into the future.
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From page 60... ...
The health care community must insist that vendors supply health care IT systems that provide meaningful cognitive support. And the research community, including researchers in computer science and health/biomedical informatics, must play a lead intellectual role in advancing the current state of the art in health care IT systems.
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From page 61... ...
A lack of familiarity with the domain-specific problems in the health care domain has often impeded the efforts of well-meaning computer scientists. Formal and elegant computer science, as understood by most computer science researchers, is often a poor match with the complex cultural and organizational environment of health care and biomedicine -- topics about which a well-trained computer science graduate is generally ignorant.
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From page 62... ...
Because the market does not today provide the IT required for small-scale optimization (the committee saw no such health care IT in its site visits) , these initiatives should also provide support for clinicians to work with computer science and IT experts to design prototype applications to support their improvement efforts.
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From page 63... ...
Thus, they can It is beyond the scope of this report to describe in detail the infrastructure needed to sustain computer science research as it might apply to health care. However, the recommendations from another National Research Council report on research at the interface between computing and biology are instructive in this regard.
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From page 64... ...
efforts by health care organizations and communities to aggregate data about health care people, processes, and outcomes from all sources subject to appropriate protection of privacy and confidentiality. Data aggregation efforts, which should be regarded as infrastructural in nature, will entail some expense, and reimbursement schedules should not discourage such expenses.
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From page 65... ...
and institutional training programs for medical informatics are models for such support, as are the research training programs in health/biomedical informatics supported by the National Library of Medicine at many educational organizations in the United States. 6.2 The Computer Science Community As early as 1992, the computer science community was exhorted to seek intellectual challenges in problem domains of societal significance. Nowhere are such challenges more apparent and important than in health care.
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From page 66... ...
• Support educational and retraining efforts for computer science researchers who want to explore research opportunities in health care. Such efforts might be offered across a broad front and might span a range in several dimensions, including time and format (e.g., weeks to years; courses, workshops, degree programs, postdoctoral fellowships)
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From page 67... ...
RECOMMENDATIONS 67 be an institutional commitment to digitize all paper records and make them available electronically in image format to all care providers. Even if capturing paper records in such a form would not make all of their content machine readable, it would go a long way toward eliminating the widely acknowledged problem of record unavailability that plagues a large number of patient-provider visits.
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