Here's What It Takes to Build the Nation's Most Trusted & Capable Health Information Network: Best Practices

Through a single connection to the Surescripts network, participants in the Surescripts Network Alliance are able to exchange actionable patient intelligence far more extensively, efficiently and effectively than they could if they had to rely on individual connections to all other organizations. Meanwhile, all Surescripts solutions—and all those who use them—benefit from the industry-leading reliability, security and scalability of the Surescripts network.

Best Practices

• The Trust Fabric - Essential to any two-sided network, the trust fabric creates confidence in participants, the integrity of the system, and how shared data can and cannot be used.
• The Transport Layer​ - The transport layer makes it technologically possible to exchange electronic health information across multiple domains.
• The Usability Layer - The usability layer enables delivery of actionable patient intelligence to the point of care within existing  clinical workflows.
• The Optimization Layer - Touching every transaction Surescripts handles, the optimization layer helps continuously improve network performance in order to deliver actionable patient intelligence as quickly and accurately as possible.

The full Surescripts article can be viewed at this link.  

A systematic review of reasons for and against asking patients about their socioeconomic contexts

This first summary of literature on the subject found many published reasons for why patients’ social and economic circumstances should be enquired about in healthcare settings. These reasons include potential benefits at the levels of individuals, health service provision, and population, as well as the potential to improve healthcare equity. Cautions and caveats include concerns about the clinician’s role in responding to patients’ social problems; the perceived importance of social health determinants compared with biomedical factors; the use of average population data from geographic areas to infer the socioeconomic experience of individuals. Actual evidence of outcomes is lacking: our review suggests hypotheses that can be tested in future research.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Strong medicine is needed to solve America’s rural health crisis

The health care situation in rural America has gotten worse since my childhood. Rural Americans face serious health disparities because of the shortage of physicians and the resulting lack of access to care. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, rural residents are generally sicker and poorer than urban residents, and are more likely to die from heart disease, cancer, unintentional injury, chronic lower respiratory disease, and stroke than their urban counterparts. Residents of rural areas who have cancer are diagnosed at later stages of the disease, have less access to clinical trials, worse outcomes, and spend 66% more time traveling to see cancer care providers.

The full STAT article can be viewed at this link.  

PROVIDER PERSPECTIVES ON SPECIALTY PRESCRIBING

Prescribing specialty medications is a complex and time-consuming process. Today there is no simple definition for specialty medications, but in general, they are costly and require unique handling. To manage the high costs and high-touch patient care associated with specialty medications, providers must follow specific guidelines for prior authorization and patient enrollment.

Branded specialty medications are projected to surpass half of medicine spending in the U.S. by 2022.1 And specialty medication takes up 94% of commercial medical benefit drug spend, but this spend represents just 15% of all patients.2 Since costs often fall under the patient’s medical benefit— not the pharmacy benefit—the information gap that providers face widens.

In 2018, Surescripts surveyed providers to gain insight on their experience when writing specialty prescriptions. We identified two pain points: a lack of key information in drug selection and the burdensome manual prescribing process. Providers believe that the pain points can be addressed and specialty prescribing improved if they have the right information at the point of care.

The full report from Surescripts can be downloaded below.  

The Link Between Burnout And Physician Hierarchy

When polled, specialists and primary care physicians alike blame the healthcare system for their burnout. Specifically, they call out “too many bureaucratic tasks,” “increasing computerization,” “too many hours” and “lack of pay” as some of the most common causes. 

These factors no doubt contribute, but they fail to explain why some specialties experience far greater rates of exhaustion, depression and dissatisfaction than others. 

The Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Provisional Drug Overdose Death Counts

This data visualization presents provisional counts for drug overdose deaths based on a current flow of mortality data in the National Vital Statistics System. Counts for the most recent final annual data are provided for comparison. National provisional counts include deaths occurring within the 50 states and the District of Columbia as of the date specified and may not include all deaths that occurred during a given time period. Provisional counts are often incomplete and causes of death may be pending investigation (see Technical notes) resulting in an underestimate relative to final counts. To address this, methods were developed to adjust provisional counts for reporting delays by generating a set of predicted provisional counts (see Technical notes).

The provisional data presented in this visualization include: (a) the reported and predicted provisional counts of deaths due to drug overdose occurring nationally and in each jurisdiction; (b) a U.S. map of the percentage changes in provisional drug overdose deaths for the current 12 month-ending period compared with the 12-month period ending in the same month of the previous year, by jurisdiction; and (c) the reported and predicted provisional counts of drug overdose deaths involving specific drugs or drug classes occurring nationally and in selected jurisdictions. The reported and predicted provisional counts represent the numbers of deaths due to drug overdose occurring in the 12-month periods ending in the month indicated. These counts include all seasons of the year and are insensitive to variations by seasonality. Deaths are reported by the jurisdiction in which the death occurred.

Several data quality metrics, including the percent completeness in overall death reporting, percentage of deaths with cause of death pending further investigation, and the percentage of drug overdose deaths with specific drugs or drug classes reported are included to aid in interpretation of provisional data as these measures are related to the accuracy of provisional counts (see Technical notes). Reporting of the specific drugs and drug classes involved in drug overdose deaths varies by jurisdiction, and comparisons of death rates involving specific drugs across selected jurisdictions should not be made (see Technical notes). Provisional data presented in this visualization will be updated on a monthly basis as additional records are received.

The full CDC release can be viewed at this link.