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The Role of Physicians in Driving Toward Unified Patient Information Management

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In our series on unified patient information management, we first introduced this new integrated approach followed by a blog post on the central position health plans have in driving toward the wider adoption of systems for UPIM.  In this third blog post of our UPIM series, we focus on the role of physicians in adopting this new patient data model. A quick refresher on UPIM: systems for UPIM offer a seamless flow of patient information, allowing healthcare stakeholders to access the data they need when they need it.  Systems for UPIM also empower clinicians to collaborate with all members on their care team and center all clinical, financial and administrative workflows around those who matters most: the patients.

It’s no secret that our healthcare system is ridden with inefficiencies. There are no standard ways for providers to obtain a full view of their patients’ medical history to provide the best care for them. Patient data lives in silos. Patient data compartmentalization and inaccessibility results in multiple, disparate, non-standardized data management approaches, which end up driving redundancies and gaps in care along the care continuum. Current patient information systems lead to confusion, skyrocketing medical costs and tenuous provider-patient relations.

Despite the popularity of new initiatives around Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and Patient Centered Medical Homes (PCMH), physicians cannot support an outcomes-based healthcare system if the very information infrastructure is fragmented. They cannot empower their patients to play an active role in their health management either.  In a recent blog post on HL7 Standards, Erica shared her experience with this very issue—even when she tried to retrieve her patient records for her new physician, she had to make multiple phone calls to all her care providers, deal with different office policies, and in some cases, pay a fee to access her information.

The good news is that providers now have a choice. They can choose to adopt flexible, unified systems for patient information management in their practice that seamlessly access, manage and share patient data from multiple sources. Such integrated systems provide a single access point for clinicians to manage all aspects of patient care – combining all critical administrative, financial and clinical patient information components to arrive at a complete picture of each patient.  This consolidated patient view is the clinician’s path toward managing better care outcomes, improving patient-provider communications and driving down medical costs. For further details on how physicians can utilize systems for UPIM, please visit this industry resource.

Stay tuned for our final post in the series: the role of patients in driving adoption for systems for UPIM.

Kimberly Labow is the chief marketing officer, overseeing all marketing and product management responsibilities for NaviNet. She has over 19 years of technology marketing experience in a variety of industries, including healthcare, and brings to NaviNet an in-depth understanding of the healthcare connectivity marketplace.

Before joining NaviNet, Ms. Labow was vice president, marketing and product management for Medfusion, where she was responsible for all aspects of both marketing and product management. Her team was engaged not only with direct marketing activities for Medfusion, but in the overall efforts to aid Medfusion’s clients in the marketing of their practices to drive ultimate utilization of their Medfusion healthcare solutions from new and existing patients.

Prior to joining Medfusion, Ms. Labow was vice president, marketing and product management for Performix Technologies where she was an integral part of the management team that led Performix to a successful sale of the company to NICE Systems in 2007.

Prior to Performix, Ms. Labow spent four years at Progress Software where she built and managed teams for both services marketing and offering management and later product marketing. Ms. Labow’s healthcare experience includes several years as marketing manager for Kronos’ healthcare systems division, as well as owning product management for PCN’s EHR product HealthPoint (now Allscripts’ HealthMatics EHR).

Ms. Labow has a B.A from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and an M.B.A from Northeastern University in Boston.

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  • Anonymous

    You are speaking in some generalizations, but it sounds like you are referring to Health Information Exchanges (HIEs). Choice and flexibility of products are just a small part of what can make this work.

    I’ve posted and blogged about this before, but its worth restating. What we desperatly need is to avoid fragmentation.

    A key step in country wide deployment of HIE’s, regardless of the company or brand is interoperability between different systems and EHR vendors. The only way I can see this is realistically working is if a large group of HIEs and vendors get together and decide upon universal software protocols, APIs, and network protocols that can be used interchangably and reliably for any company.

    The analogy I always give is the my flat screen TV’s HDMI cable. Any peripheral I buy from a reciever from Sony, an XBOX from Microsoft, or an Apple TV from Apple can utilize that cable to communicate with my TV. That’s because a hardware committee decided about use and adoption of this standard, and hence it became mainstream.

    To have an unlimited number of communication standards for HIE’s is very counter productive to obtaining a HealthCare 2.0 nation as opposed to individual silos. We need a standard, and it should be decided upon rapidly.

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  • Kim Labow

    We absolutely agree that standards are necessary. That’s what UPIM is all about– creating a standard platform from which all healthcare stakeholders can access complete patient information from one secure location. Platforms for UPIM bring information together and allow vendors to plug their solutions into one secure ecosystem, facilitating information access and sharing. Learn more about UPIM at unifiedPIM.com.