As any athlete will tell you, “follow-through” is pretty important

As health information technology gears up to steam out of port, it is important that we match good policies with good practice. All too often, especially in the political arena, leaders focus more on fast and easy press releases, photo ops, and town halls and less on the long, hard, slog of implementation and maintenance.

[For any person interested in health information technology, the “dog versus cat” debate should be required reading. One can find good discussions at the eCareManagement blog and The Health Care Blog. Personally, I have never been much of a “cat” person.]

For example, Florida’s legislature recently passed S462, which permits the Department of Health to collect and monitor prescription drug data in an attempt to reduce “pill mills” and “doctor shopping.” Sounds great, right? Well, yes and no…it intends to achieve a laudable aim but will more than likely constitute one more data silo that will sit on a server somewhere and be underutilized in terms of health services research.

Even more importantly, in a state that has a spotty contracting history and ranks dead last (yes, 50th) in state employee pay per capita, it is vitally important that Florida “follows-through” to make the process as easy, secure, and effective as possible.

To see how this process could go terribly wrong if not managed well, one can look at a recent report in the Washington Post and a nice commentary at Insure Blog. As reported by the Post,

Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.

The Commonwealth of Virginia has yet to confirm a security breach of its Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program but it has shut down portions of its website and is referring inquiries to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

With the necessary move to put sensitive information into electronic health records and to share that information with providers for the purpose of coordinating care, it is imperative that we move beyond simple press releases and empower thoughtful, deliberate leaders whose time horizon is greater than 2 years. ~BAA