Fulfilling the PROMISe

Dr. Larry Weed

A brand new EMR is being rolled out in a midsize hospital. The EMR is exclusively based on touchscreen technology, with devices strategically placed on the floor. It provides concurrent access to medical records for all team members (physicians, nurses, pharmacists, radiologists, dieticians, secretaries) wherever they may be. Patients are also accessing the EMR. They enter their own histories and describe symptoms in detail through the same touchscreen devices. This patient-centered EMR, built by a team of clinicians and technologists working together, is taking a huge step forward in Clinical Decision Support (CDS). Physicians are not only shown differential diagnoses based on what patients and other team members entered into the system, but are also presented with individualized care plans, possible side effects, dosage recommendations and drug-drug-interaction alerts, all referencing evidence available in medical literature. Longitudinal records, test results and narratives are available by problem and by patient, and the response time is never more than half a second between the thousands of screens available. The place is Vermont, and the year is 1970.

Half a century ago, when work on this EMR was taking place, Healthcare IT was on the cutting edge of technology. The Problem Oriented Medical Information System (PROMIS), the brainchild of Dr. Lawrence Weed, was pushing the envelope on every technology from hardware to operating systems, to network communications, database design and programming languages. By the time this government funded project was finally shut down, the PROMIS team dealt with such issues as mass storage, federated or single database, high availability, human interface design and networking between geographically dispersed locations. It will take several decades for the rest of the world to catch up with Dr. Weed’s, now defunct, innovation and produce something like IBM’s Watson software package, which is yet to be adapted and tested in health care. Somewhere, somehow, we took a wrong turn in Healthcare IT, and it wasn’t the much maligned billing influence, since PROMIS from day one, attempted to integrate billing in its software, with no ill effects.

But something of that brilliant era did survive. PROMIS was essentially an early attempt to computerize the Problem Oriented Medical Record (POMR) proposed by Dr. Weed in 1964, which is almost exclusively used today in clinical documentation, and better known as the ubiquitous SOAP note (Subjective-Objective-Assessment-Plan). Practically every EHR in existence today is based on Dr. Lawrence Weed’s SOAP note format. Whether small or large, client-server or browser, free text or all template based, once you open the encounter note, you are presented with the familiar structure of History of Present Illness (HPI), followed by Social, Medical and Family Histories, Review of Systems (ROS), Exam, Assessment and Plan. Since this is perceived to be the heart of the EHR you will find much “innovation” and “secret sauce” added to the electronic SOAP note, with the singular purpose of speeding up documentation and ensuring that the finished note is a proper clinical, legal and financial document. And as most of us know only too well, we are not there yet.

Interestingly, the folks working on PROMIS faced the same hurdles we are facing today, albeit their tools and technologies were pretty much stone-age compared to present day technology. It is fascinating to see how much effort and concern went into selecting just the right user interface, ensuring that response time was measured in fractions of a second and in keeping the system up 24x7 and as error free as possible. For the clinical staff that took the time to enter data through the state of the art user interface of a  Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitor with little touch-sensitive strips attached in just the right places, PROMIS delivered serious value. It offered differential diagnoses for each problem, patient specific care plans, collaboration and real time access to medical records. It obviously wasn’t enough though, since the project did get canceled in the early eighties. Today’s EHRs can, and do, offer collaboration and real time access to records much more efficiently then PROMIS ever dreamed possible. However, only very few EHRs are capable of coming up with differentials, and care plans consist mostly of order sets that you can create yourself (if you wish). As to efficiency of data entry and pertinent information retrieval, we are only slightly better off than the PROMIS pioneer users were. You would expect that every EHR vendor, big and small, would be feverishly working on exactly these problems, trying to bring more value to their customers and differentiate themselves in a crowded market. Well, they were, until very recently.

As Meaningful Use is pushing, shoving, enticing and coercing everybody, by any means necessary, to abandon paper medical records and adopt EHRs, it is also redefining the nature and construct of those records and it is imposing a new set of priorities on all EHR builders. Meaningful Use is about collecting certain data and moving all data out of the originating system to all sorts of other systems, including patients, care providers, governments and other facilities, and more than anything else, Meaningful Use is about measuring clinical quality or lack thereof. There are 113 clinical quality measures proposed for Meaningful Use Stage 2 and there are 65 measures in the Accountable Care Organization (ACO) proposal, which Meaningful Use is also endeavoring to support. Although users are only required to report on a handful of measures for now, those who build decent EHRs must write code for all measures, and this is not a simple thing, since a single measure can require complex computations over many data elements which may or may not even exist in the software. Add to this the remaining Meaningful Use measures and you have a big problem, amplified by orders of magnitude due to the very short timelines between publications of new mandatory requirements. The result is that there are no development cycles left for such things as enhancing user experience, or adding features that customers routinely ask for. Granted, Meaningful Use is considering taking on usability of EHRs as well, but at least initially, this will be through the narrow lens of patient safety, and not so much related to direct value to the actual paying customer.

Are we then doomed to repeat the PROMIS disappointment on a grander scale because the value to the customer is not readily recognizable? Not quite. The differences between our effort to computerize medical records and those led by Dr. Weed forty years ago are many, and none is larger than the fact that today’s copiously funded campaign for EHR adoption is firmly anchored in a much larger effort to change the health care delivery system as a whole (for better or worse). While Dr. Weed was experimenting in one remote hospital, today we are moving full steam ahead on a national level in thousands of hospitals with hundreds of thousands of physicians in both hospital and ambulatory practice, and the point of no return (to paper) has been passed a long time ago. We do however run the risk of making the entire process unnecessarily painful, slow, expensive and fraught with unintended consequences, if we continue to prioritize the political needs of the project itself above and beyond the needs of the customer.