While hospitals are ramping up their use of information technology (IT) to provide better care for their patients, a number of other facilities, such as nursing homes and rehab centers, are falling behind. Those facilities often require better systems, as well as skilled workers, to provide efficient and cost-effective care.
That’s according to a report from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, which found that long-term and post-acute care (LTPAC) facilities, which are designed to help patients improve after their hospital stays, need to enhance health IT efforts by improving electronic access to information. The report said that sharing patient data among different facilities will be vital to lowering costs and “achieving a more coordinated, person-centric” health-care system. Improved health IT will allow home care providers, primary care providers, long-term care providers and hospitals to share access to the patient’s records.
The report provided some examples of long-term care providers that are successfully improving care with the use of health IT. Some providers have been able to use remote-monitoring devices to keep an eye on their patients’ conditions, even when the health care provider can’t be at the patient’s side.
Western New York Beacon Community, for example, is using a program called HEALTHeLINK, which is a health information exchange (HIE) designed to improve communication between different care providers. Home health nurses can send select information about their patients’ potential health complications via the HIE to health providers without bogging them down with routine data.
Eastern Maine HomeCare (EMHC) provides Tele-HomeCare services for patients with chronic diseases, so Tele-HomeCare nurses can monitor patients and intervene at key moments. This makes the health care system more efficient by reducing the number of hospital visits; many patients receiving long-term care are now able to stay at their homes, which also lowers costs.
The need for better health IT at LTPAC facilities is an ongoing issue, as the number of people using long-term care services is expected to more than double from 13 million to 27 million in the first 50 years of this century, according to the report. The increase is in large part because of an increase in the elderly population age 65 and older, which will grow from 40 million to 89 million from 2010 to 2050.
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