“Reinvestment Is Not Just About Technology”
The above is the title of a very insightful and thought-provoking
blog post by Dr. Nick van Terheyden, Chief Medical Officer for M*Modal. He begins his article by quoting
another blog post by Julian Alssid and Jonathan Leviss, who contend that investing in technology is only one part of the solution to a better healthcare system in this country. Investing in Human Capital, say Alssid and Leviss, is also crucial to the successful implementation of a national health information infrastructure:
"Physicians, nurses, and other health care providers routinely learn new skills and adopt new technologies ... What is missing, however, is a parallel training track for a sufficient workforce to develop, implement, manage, and support advanced information technologies in hospitals, doctors' offices, and other health care venues."
In other words, as formidable as the technological barriers to national health information exchange (HIE) may be, perhaps even more challenging is the need for skilled knowledge workers to support the technology infrastructure once it's in place, says Dr. van Terheyden:
"This is especially true for the embattled medical transcription industry that has been fighting declining rates of pay as hospitals and healthcare providers continue to push for lower and lower line rates. All this is driven by the perception [that] the medical transcription is a cost, when in actual fact it is a value added service that frees up the clinical staff to focus on taking care of patients rather than the drudgery of data entry.
Kudos to Dr. van Terheyden for making the case for valuing medical transcriptionists for the "value add" we bring to the process of accurately capturing and recording patient encounter information in order to make our healthcare system more efficient. There's such a thing as being "Penny wise and pound foolish," or as Dr. Nick puts it:
"There are lots of examples of systems trying to turn clinicians into data entry clerks and while there are instances where this methodology makes sense in many cases it does not."
Hear, hear.