Lilly's Taurel: Go paperless, share records

[JohnMack]

Source: IndyStar.com

[See also: "Lilly Cymbalta Marketers are NOT Practicing What Lilly Executives Preach!"]

Taurel: Go paperless, share records
At health-care summit, Lilly chief calling for 'true information revolution'

Millions of patients. Thousands of drugs. Countless doctors, hospitals, clinics and procedures. Billions of pieces of medical data.

It all adds up to a fragmented U.S. health-care system that needs to move more quickly into the computer age, says the top executive at Indianapolis drug maker Eli Lilly and Co.

In a speech today at the Cleveland Clinic, Sidney Taurel, Lilly's chairman and chief executive, plans to ask the health-care industry, medical community and U.S. government to work more closely to bring about a "true information revolution in health care."

Such a move could provide a clearer picture about the safety and effectiveness of medicines, and give earlier warnings about side effects of some drugs, such as Vioxx. The arthritis drug was withdrawn by drug maker Merck three years ago over concerns about heart attack and stroke after long-term use.

"The use of prescription medicines always will be a matter of balancing benefits and risks," Taurel will say, according to an advance copy of his speech. "Frankly, that's the first and most basic insight that needs to be understood by health-care consumers, not to mention the news media and politicians.

"Fortunately, systems are now within our grasp to much more quickly identify both the true benefits and the full extent of risks associated with medicines in widespread use."

Taurel is calling for a voluntary collaboration, and stops short of asking Congress or the Food and Drug Administration to require such a move. But his call for an information overhaul comes as the national health-care system is getting increased scrutiny by patients, regulators and politicians. Nearly all of the announced 2008 presidential candidates are calling for better medical record-keeping and wider sharing of information to cut costs and improve care.

Three years ago, the Bush administration presented a strategy to modernize the health-care system with upgraded information technology, saying such a move could save billions of dollars and reduce medical errors.

Some experts say the health-care industry is slow to invest in information technology, compared with other businesses. Many physicians and clinics still rely on paper records and are reluctant to share the information.

"Right now, the informational infrastructure of the U.S. health-care system is two generations behind everyone else," said Les Funtleyder, a drug analyst at Miller Tabak & Co. "I think Sidney Taurel is absolutely right (that) an improvement is needed. But money is the big problem."

He said it probably would cost tens of billions of dollars for doctors, clinics and hospitals to upgrade their computer systems.

Financial pressures
The pharmaceutical industry, too, is feeling more pressure to cut costs and become more transparent about the safety and effectiveness of drugs. Some drug makers are taking steps in this direction. Three years ago, Lilly became the first to disclose the results of all its clinical trials on the Internet.
Taurel's proposal on sharing medical information is intended for an audience of some of the nation's medical leaders attending Cleveland Clinic's 2007 Medical Innovations Summit. Taurel is the keynote speaker.

He plans to urge more doctors and clinics to shift from paper records to electronic medical records, a small but growing trend in the medical industry. Such records include information of diagnoses, treatments and outcomes, and should be more widely shared while protecting patient privacy, Taurel says.
"There used to be some good excuses for this poor diffusion of information, and for the time lags in obtaining medical data," the speech says. "Chief among them were the dependence on paper records and the tyranny of distance, against which the postal service and even the fax machine were poor remedies, along with the sheer institutional complexity of the health care system."

While some doctors are embracing the shift to paperless records and sharing them with other health-care providers, the medical community has yet to move strongly in that direction. Part of the reason is cost.

"We're all for more transparency and information sharing, but the challenge is to figure out how to do it," said Robert Mills, a spokesman for the American Medical Association. "Doctors are expected to pay the cost, but the folks that benefit from this information are insurance companies and drug companies."
Taurel singles out some groups that are swiftly moving to share health information, including the Indiana Health Information Exchange, a network used by 27 hospitals and 5,200 physicians to share the results of laboratory tests. The exchange allows physicians to see immediately whether their patients have had tests done elsewhere, and if so, what the results were, to avoid duplication and provide better care.

Lilly also is working with competitors Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson on a project to understand how to find telling information about drugs in large databases.

The move comes as Lilly and other drug companies try to tailor medicines to smaller groups of patients with certain genetic predispositions or health conditions, a movement known as "personalized medicine."

"Certainly, at Lilly, we spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on clinical trials," Taurel's speech says. "But the key insight in our situation, and I think it applies quite broadly, is that unlike most other assets, health information actually becomes more valuable the more it is used, studied and applied. It does not depreciate."

Call Star reporter John Russell at (317) 444-6283.