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The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) late this week brought together experts in informatics, health information technology (HIT) and health policy in Reston, Virginia, to discuss potential unintended consequences of HIT and policy.

David Blumenthal, M.D., Ph.D., National HIT coordinator; and Aneesha Chopra, M.P.P., chief technology officer, Executive Office of the President, and associate director for Technology in the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, were keynote speakers during AMIA’s fourth annual invitational Health Policy Conference.

The conference was co-chaired by Marshfield Clinic Scientist Justin Starren, M.D., Ph.D., director, Marshfield’s Biomedical Informatics Research Center. In addition, two Marshfield Clinic units were active sponsors of and participants at the conference - Cattails MD Software, the unit which provides an electronic health record (EHR) to Marshfield Clinic and others; and Security Health Plan of Wisconsin, Inc.

With passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the United States is poised to invest billions of dollars in HIT in general and EHRs especially over the next few years as a national imperative to improve health care delivery and reduce health care costs.

“Any endeavor of this scale will produce unintended and unanticipated consequences,” Starren said. “By starting to think about and discuss those possible consequences now, we can minimize their negative impact.”

Carl Christensen, Marshfield Clinic chief technology officer, said that “it has taken Marshfield Clinic 40 years to develop software that now supports a truly chartless electronic workflow. Other organizations are now trying to cover the same distance in less than one tenth of the time. That will present significant challenges.” Speaking to the conference, Blumenthal called for the “creation of a learning community” within HIT.

“We support Dr. Blumenthal’s call for a learning community,” said Michael Murphy, director of Marketing and Product Development, CattailsMD Software. “Cattails Software was a sponsor of this conference because we believe that no single vendor has all the answers. By sharing knowledge, we can make all EHR systems better.”

“Security Health Plan is constantly looking for ways to improve the health of our shareholders,” said Steve Youso, Security Health Plan chief executive officer. “Helping improve EHR software quality is one way to do that.”

Unintended consequences occurring in previous HIT implementations were discussed as well as lessons from other industries; possible unintended consequences of current HIT policies; and approaches to minimizing negative unintended consequences.

For more information or for a report from the conference, contact AMIA at www.amia.org

About AMIA

AMIA is the professional home for biomedical and health informatics. AMIA is dedicated to promoting the effective organization, analysis, management and use of information in health care in support of patient care, public health, teaching, research, administration and related policy. AMIA’s 4,000 members advance the use of health information and communications technology in clinical care and clinical research, personal health management, public health/population, and translational science with the ultimate objective of improving health.

About Marshfield Clinic

The Marshfield Clinic system provides patient care, research and education with 45 locations in northern, central and western Wisconsin, making it one of the largest comprehensive medical systems in the United States.

About CattailsMD

For more information about CattailsMD™, go to http://www.cattailsmd.com

About Security Health Plan

Security Health Plan of Wisconsin, Inc. is a physician-sponsored health maintenance organization, owned by Marshfield Clinic, and serves more than 167,000 members in a 32-county service area of Wisconsin. Security Health Plan is the third largest health maintenance organization in Wisconsin and provides insured and self-funded plans to a variety of large and small employers, as well as to individuals and families. Security Health Plan has been named to the U.S. News & World Report/America's Best Health Plans1 ranking for four consecutive years and is accredited by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).

1“America’s Best Health Plans” is a trademark of U.S. News & World Report.