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Wired for health: With infrastructure in place, health care providers have new possibilities for improving health
Feb 28, 2012
As we know, a big part of the One Health/One Medicine initiative is based around collaboration not just among MU’s health profession’s departments, but all over campus. This article highlights an example.
From MIZZOU Magazine
The United States is flunking out on health care, according to a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine. In 2006, we spent more per capita on health care than any other country but ranked 39th for infant mortality, 43rd for adult female mortality, 43rd for adult male mortality and 36th for life expectancy. “For the amount of money we’re spending, we should be able to create more health,” says Michael LeFevre, chief medical information officer at MU Health Care.
LeFevre thinks that adapting information technology, or IT, to health care can help Americans get more bang for their health care bucks, which made up 17.6 percent of the gross domestic product in 2009. LeFevre, a 2011 inductee into the Institute of Medicine (See “Members of the academies” on Page 28 for more on National Academies members at MU), has led MU’s decade-long partnership with IT giant Cerner to improve care through technology. MU’s progress is well ahead of newcomers in the nationwide rush set off by the federal government’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which paid $19 billion to help wire hospitals and doctors’ offices. University of Missouri Health Care is one of the nation’s “Most Wired” hospitals, according to a survey released in the July 2011 issue of Hospitals & Health Networks magazine. And in May 2011, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Analytics, a company that evaluates hospitals’ progress in implementing electronic records, announced that MU Health Care ha2d reached several milestones in its transition to integrated electronic records, including: More…