WASHINGTON, March 14 (UPI) -- There's no question that healthcare IT is on the Bush administration's agenda, and vendors are positioning themselves to cash in.
Two years ago, in his State of the Union address, the president called for the widespread adoption in the next 10 years of electronic medical records --digitized versions of the doctor's clipboard that can travel with a patient or be accessed anywhere online.
He then appointed David Brailer the first-ever national health information czar to make it happen.
But to actually make such developments useful to healthcare consumers and providers, integrative technology is needed.
Two healthcare IT companies unveiled new systems to do just that at the National Press Club Tuesday in Washington, D.C.
An Atlanta company called eMedicalFiles unveiled a line of products that would store electronic records online and make them accessible at a doctor's office or hospital in a secure way.
A biometric sensor, about the size of a box of matches, reads a patient's thumbprint and then grants access to medical records that can be updated in real-time by healthcare providers anywhere. To ensure compatibility with the multitude of operating systems in use, the information is coded at the simplest level possible.
"A patient can individually bring their medical information with them without having a degree in medicine," said Wayne Singer, vice president of marketing.
The thumbprint reader, already used in a pilot program by Texas Medicaid, prevents fraud by verifying identity and preventing medical billing unless a patient is physically present for an appointment, Singer said.
It also stores the thumbprint information -- encoded to prevent reverse engineering -- separately from actual files to protect patients' privacy.
In addition to pulling up medical records, the program will notify healthcare providers about insurance eligibility and needed health maintenance.
HealthMarket, a subsidiary of Texas-based insurance company UICI, demonstrated a healthcare price comparison portal that is already in use in 12 states.
Consumers can search a database of 430,000 medical professionals, 4,000 hospitals and 26,000 auxiliary services like labs and medical equipment providers for price and quality information.
Typing in one of the 20,000 included health procedures and a zip-code produces a list of health care providers and what they charge. To make information simpler to understand, every listing is displayed with a thermometer graphic -- green means inexpensive, red means the price exceeds what the insurer will pay.
HealthMarket is now sold as an insurance product to small business and the self-employed, but eventually UICI will sell it on a contract basis to other insurers to help keep costs down, CEO William Gedwed, who is slated to testify before the House this week, told United Press International.
If such products are really going to be made useful to consumers, however, they need to have the electronic records for patients to access and recent studies have shown that few healthcare providers have the capacity to deliver fully-integrated electronic medical records.
However, until they do, customer and provider portals, no matter how user friendly, will lack the content to deliver.
In its current state, hospital information is anything but integrated, said Matt Meitzner, a senior associate at ECRI, a non-profit health services research agency.
"The fact is that there are many systems," he said, "You have all these different pieces of the puzzle."
For example, different departments -- radiology, emergency room, pharmacies and laboratories -- all have IT systems that are specialized to work well for their specific purpose, but not necessarily together, Meitzner said, and the people in charge of those departments are not necessarily eager to accept new systems that are more integration-friendly.
It's also not so simple to convert a patient's 4-inch-thick paper medical record into a useful digital format, he said. Scanning documents makes them viewable electronically, but not searchable "and that's not any better than paper."
But that doesn't mean that the dream of an electronic portal where patients can access all their information won't happen.
As hospitals demand more integration, software vendors are working on products that are able to create integrated records without sacrificing the advantages of specialization.
And healthcare providers, realizing the advantages of electronic records, are increasing the proportion of records that are electronically available as they move forward.
"It's something that I think everyone's working toward," Meitzner said, "and more and more, patients want to have that information."
