In June, Minnesota held its annual eHealth Summit in Minneapolis, and fortunately I was able to attend. REACH, the federally designated Health Information Technology (HIT) Regional Extension Center (REC) for Minnesota and North Dakota, had a booth that I was able to staff, which is something I really enjoy. It gives me the opportunity to talk to new people, and I jump at the chance!
Most conferences I attend are focused on rural, except perhaps the Health Information Management Systems Society (HiMSS) conference (more about that later: some very exciting rural HIT news coming soon!!!). The eHealth Summit mostly had urban and integrated delivery network attendees, with rural being in the minority. During my presentation I asked how many people were rural and a few hands went up. Interestingly, most of the hands were from folks who work at other stops along the continuum of care besides hospitals and clinics. There were behavioral health, home care, school nursing, dentistry and elder services represented. This is very exciting! These providers have been left out of the Meaningful Use program, and do not receive incentives or get REC assistance, but they see the value in HIT and are very quickly adopting electronic health records. The eHealth Summit was always a good opportunity to see what the Big Systems were up to in HIT, but now the entire spectrum of health care services is at the table.
Some of the most interesting presentations and discussions involved non-hospital and non-clinic providers. For example, I attended a standing-room-only presentation on Behavioral Health IT. The conversation quickly turned into a sharing and learning experience for the room of over 100 attendees. Some of the attendees were from chemical dependency treatment centers, and they shared their concerns for CFR 42 Part 2: Confidentiality of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Patient Records compliance, while some mental health providers discussed the difficulties of finding an electronic health record (EHR) that is designed for behavioral health and that can do billing well.
Sure, there were a number of presentations from hospitals discussing how they are putting in the infrastructure for exchange or how they engaged staff in the EHR implementation. It was more interesting for me to see providers that are not participating in the Meaningful Use program to be rapidly implementing EHRs and learning from their hospital and clinic counterparts. This is a fantastic development for HIT, and more importantly, for patient care.
Now if we can just get everyone to start exchanging information and talking to each other.
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