Health care reform or connected care?

Ever get so down in the weeds that you lose the big picture? It feels like time to come up for air and remind ourselves what in the health care world is going on. What follows is an excerpt from my second post on EMRlogic Live, 11 December 2011. I hope it'll be a useful reminder. You can read the original posts via the Archives button to the right. Select December 2011 and scroll down to Parts 1 and 2 of "What are you doing about health care reform?"


But before you read on, let me make an important clarification. I suspect that the term "health care reform" may have become a bad word for some. In my last post, I distinguished between health care reform and health insurance reform. Given the debate around ObamaCare, the discussion of health care reform may have become tainted. For myself, I'm re-directing my thinking to a more neutral and potentially more helpful term: connected care. It describes in vanilla terms where we're going ... to a connected community of health care, the likes of which we have never seen. And it's a good thing.

"I asked an optometrist I considered to be a prominent figure in the eye care profession what he was doing about health care reform. Response? “You know, I just don’t believe the feds are going to pull it off.” Unfortunately, that answer belies what I’ve heard all too often. Ostrich syndrome.

Optometry has a problem. Though far from all, too many leaders are playing wait ‘n see. Ophthalmology is not playing that game. Instead, the MDs are running away with the evidence-based medicine that will be critical to the Clinical Quality Measures upon which all eye care pay-for-performance will be established.

In our 2007 white paper, A White Paper for Optometry: Medicare Pay-for-Performance & Value-Driven Health Care, we asked the question, “Is it in the best interests of either the patient or the health care system itself to emphasize surgical and advanced-treatment methods over early intervention and preventive methods?” Then we gave our answer. “Clearly not! Yet this is the natural course of the current trend toward pay-for-performance. Optometry must position itself to gain input into the outcomes selection process.”

My sense about eye care is that we're moving in the right direction. MU attestations (1238 Optometrists and 655 Ophthalmologists in 2011) and the news of so many ECPs receiving their year 1 stimulus payments is encouraging. Surely our colleague above is less convinced today that the feds aren't going to pull it off.


2011 was the year of the EHR. We got over the initial hurdle and many of us are now seriously in the game. But if we've learned anything, it's that it's not over. There are more hurdles. And the 2012 hurdle is the HIE. Your statewide Health Information Exchange is your doorway into true connected care. Watch for more on this in the coming weeks. Remember that the purpose of EHRs was never about recording results - you've been doing that on paper for years already. The true purpose is to blow open the doors, create transparency and connectivity within the system. That's why we call it connected care.

Alistair Jackson, M.Ed.