Panelists at the New England HIMSS Chapter Conference on HIT, held Oct 17 in South Portland, say it will take a lot of work to correct technical and financial problems in the healthcare industry.
"I don't think a (healthcare) fix will come from the government. We need to change how we practice," said Dan Mingle, MD, who is based in South Paris, Maine. "We are each experts in certain areas; we shouldn't be waiting on others to show us how to run our practices."
Doctors are choosing platforms that allow them to practice as they had before, though they now able to access data from different locations.
"Ideally, we'd like to meld under one tech suite," said John Stone, corporate director of finance and administration systems for Partners Healthcare in Charlestown, Mass.
Mingle said physicians are more mobile now and are looking for a "consistent way of interacting with the system." He added there is no budget for IT.
"If Maine were to standardize costs based upon the top 10 percent of best practices, approximately $300 million could be saved in a year - if we could capture it," he said.
When he was director of ambulatory clinical informatics for MaineGeneral Medical Center in Augusta, Me., Mingle said, he had $1 billion to fund IT for 140,000 patients.
"We're at the stage where we're not starting projects, we're just following through," said Wayne Printy, vice president and chief financial officer for Miles Memorial Hospital/St. Andrews Hospital in Boothbay Harbor, Maine.
"It's easier to build a car to than to process a patient through the healthcare system," added Stone. "I now have the luxury of going into a project of any size and knowing that I'm not the biggest problem."
"Reporting is easy, but it's expensive," said Mingle. "With RFPs, we ought to look at projects already in existence and share."
According to Mingle, one of the failings of Maine healthcare is that "we don't practice cost-effective methods, we practice profit-effective methods."
Printy said there is no motivation to move to a better system. Vendors don't want to communicate, he said, and everyone would just move to best-of-breed.
"There is a lack of trust across the system," said Mingle. "Workflows are based around technology and we're not sure how to break the inertia."