Transitions of Care

Jane Brock, M.D., the chief medical officer of the Colorado Foundation for Medical Care, that state's Medicare quality improvement organization, discusses recent research-driven learnings around what makes for successful forays into improving care transitions-and the IT leveraging that will need to take place in communities nationwide.

Earlier this month, the Health Research Institute at PriceWaterhouseCoopers consulting firm released a new report, “Top health industry issues of 2013: Picking up the pace on health reform.” PWC’s John Edwards, director of the consulting firm’s healthcare advisory division, shares his perspectives on the most pressing challenges facing healthcare IT leaders right now. Here’s a hint: think data and information systems, not IT per se.

Rapid improvements in technology, semantic data structures, informatics professional collaboration and sequencing technologies are not necessarily the only gaps needed for the realization of personalized medicine (improving genomic and phenotypic data integration) but these must be taken into account on how best to exploit the opportunities to facilitate personalized medicine.

What seems obvious, on both the macro and micro levels, is that physicians can no longer practice medicine effectively without strong, effective clinical decision support tools at the point of care. Case in point: a close friend’s holiday emergency room experience.

At the five-hospital Inova Health System in northern Virginia, Daniel Rosenthal, M.D. is helping to lead a groundbreaking effort to better predict the need for interventions and optimize care transitions, using state-of-the-art clinical information tools in innovative ways.