Drowning in Data

The "meaningful use" standards for electronic health records released last month by the federal government were softened in response to criticism that proposed rules released earlier in the year were overly onerous. Critics included the American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association.

Now, front-line health care providers are clamoring for more rigorous standards that they say are needed to improve the effectiveness of electronic medical records, reports Government Health IT.

Several physicians voiced their concerns this month before the government's Health IT Policy Committee's meaningful use work group, which will shape subsequent definitions of meaningful use. The standards provide a benchmark for determining the eligibility of doctors and hospitals to receive federal incentives for adopting electronic health records.

The doctors argued that more must be done to coordinate, manage and make meaningful the glut of data contained in electronic records. At present, relevant data is scattered or hidden, said Dr. Paul Tang, chief medical information officer at Palo Medical Foundation, so much so that "you ... can't see what you need to see very quickly."

Dr. Christine Sinsky, who practices in Dubuque, Iowa, rued how easy it is "to overlook a recent procedure buried in a multi-page list of alphabetized entries."

Help may be on the way.

A pair of doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital has developed an application that sorts and ranks data pulled from multiple electronic medical records and other databases. Called the Queriable Patient Inference Dossier, the system is like Google for medical records -- without the catchy name.

The system would essentially automate physicians' manual searches for data, which eats up an estimated 20 percent of their time, and would go a long way toward eliminating redundant diagnostic tests, saving 5 percent (or almost $78 billion) of total health-care costs, reports Technology Review.

The search tool acts like a medical intelligence system, combining the functions of a search engine with a programming system and a growing catalog of search modules and applications, said one of Dossier's creators, Dr. Michael Zalis, Dotmed.com reported.

The August issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology includes a paper, Advanced Search of the Electronic Medical Record: Augmenting Safety and Efficiency in Radiology, written by Zalis and Mitchell Harris, his collaborator on Dossier.