Seattle Business Magazine hosts second annual Leaders in Health Care event
By Seattle Business Magazine February 26, 2010
The 2010 Leaders in Health Care forum yesterday could not have come at a better time. As lawmakers were leaving an inconclusive and disappointing Health Care Summit in Washington, D.C., health care professionals were gathering at Seattle’s Columbia Tower Club to discuss the immediate challenges facing their field, none of which are small. As Dr. Thomas H. Wood of Swedish Medical Center put it, “health care is the most complicated system ever developed by humans.”
The one hour forum that started the event was focused on one small but important part of that system: electronic medical records. The hope among all of the panelists was that electronic records would help make health care a little less complicated. Rather than describing digital records as a new filing system, Dr. Eric Larson of Group Health Research Institute talked about the technology’s use as a tool for patients. People can have access at any time to their own records of medications, immunizations and allergies, and can communicate with their physicians in real time without having to schedule an appointment.
David Cerino, General Manager in the Health Solutions Group at Microsoft, stressed the importance of not only giving patients access to their own records, but actually giving them an active role in their care. As health care providers begin integrating their digital record databases, they should remember to put patients in the center, he said. “It’s not going to work if everybody wants to be the hub instead of the spokes.”
However, like any new system, there are potential problems. In the not-so-distant past, a physician would walk out onto the floor, pick up a patient’s medical records and talk to a nurse about how the patient was doing. The advantage of electronic medial records is that any patient’s medical history is a click away from any computer or handset, whereas paper records can easily get lost. The potential problem, Wood said, is that personal discussion between doctor, nurse and patient may start to break down. “The opportunity for face-to-face communication isn’t there anymore.”
Another major problem with digital medical records is that not every hospital has them. Inland Northwest Health Services CEO Tom Fritz pointed out that although the federal government would like to see an electronic network of records shared between hospitals across the nation by 2011, many hospitals in regions like eastern Washington still use only paper records. Such hospitals could take anywhere from six to 18 months to build an electronic system.
Despite the challenges facing health care providers, Larson concluded that comprehensive electronic records will help attract more talent to the field of medicine. “Anything you do to improve the workplace draws people back into why they got into medicine in the first place.”
In his keynote speech following the forum, Public Health Seattle and King County Director Dr. David W. Fleming said that the average life expectancy in King County in 1900 was 45. Today the average life expectancy is 81, but Fleming said that is not necessarily good news. The number of unhealthy years in a person’s life has actually gone up, so that people are living “longer, sicker lives.” To solve this problem, Fleming said we should think of health care and public health as more than just hospitals and doctors treating infectious diseases, but as preventative medicine to solve national health problems like obesity, diabetes and hypertension.
The evening concluded with the award ceremony, which honored recipients in eight categories. To read about the winners, pick up the March issue of Seattle Business Magazine or visit the web page here.