Achieving High Performance in US Health Care through Information Technology

To heal itself, the US health care industry is increasingly turning to information technology to help it reach high performance. Through funding strategies, state and federal health programs can play a role in shaping the proposed health network, and so establish a de facto standard for the industry.

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Medicare and Medicaid, along with the rest of the US health care system, are at a critical crossroads.

Budget pressures are escalating as costs far outpace state and federal revenues, with the National Association of State Budget Officers predicting that Medicaid cost increases will exceed 12 percent a year compared to annual revenue growth among the states of five to seven percent. Moreover, government health programs and providers across the country are facing scrutiny over quality, safety and access to care.

For many, the panacea could be the more innovative use of information technology.

The US Department of Health and Human Services is leading an ambitious public- and private-sector effort to map out plans to build a US health care IT network, progressing the whole system toward high performance.

The network offers a singular opportunity to change the practice of medicine in America and to catch up with other nations that are already starting to achieve high performance. Government programs can assert their leadership by taking steps to establishing a de-facto standard that encourages the pervasive adoption and use of both electronic health records and a national health IT network, which could greatly improve the problems of paper records that mean that crucial information often is not available at the point of need, especially in emergencies.

Improvements of this nature would also come at reduced cost.

Funding is necessary for the development of these regional health information organizations as well as the ongoing cost of operations. Funding could include grants from public and private entities, tax incentives and low-interest rates, and third-party contracts. State Medicaid programs could play an important role in driving demand for electronic services and in setting a de facto standard.

Accenture is committed to supporting the development and use of a national health care IT network to drive the US health care system toward high performance.

Accenture believes that a monolithic system with central control of patient data would prove unwieldy, rigid, costly and inefficient. Rather, a distributed data and services model composed of hundreds or thousands of smaller networks offers the best structure for building a robust and flexible information technology network that is:

• Patient-centric.
• Standards-based.
• Secure and private.
• Focused on supplying accurate and timely information that improves clinical outcomes.
• Large enough to ensure patient coverage and an appropriate return on investment.
• Built to complement and integrate with existing information technology investments.
• Designed to allow incremental improvements.

This approach would enable providers to aggregate and retrieve clinical data faster and more reliably than in a non-centralized system where data is stored in individual doctors' offices. This information could also be basis of information sharing that could support regional disease management initiatives.

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