Bert Caldwell: Gingrich visit speaks well for INHS

Officials at Inland Northwest Health Services may regret the day they invited Newt Gingrich to town.

Wednesday, after seeing the capabilities of the INHS medical information network, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives said he will soon flood the Spokane organization with inquiries from groups laboring with inferior systems.

“This may really be the finest model in the country,” Gingrich said after briefings and demonstrations at Sacred Heart Medical Center.

Gingrich knows the territory. He founded the Center for Health Transformation in 2003 with creation of a National Health Information Network among his priorities. “Paper kills,” says Gingrich, who has estimated that mistakes eliminated by shifting from paper to electronic prescriptions would save 9,000 lives a year.

Delays publishing information on the latest medical discoveries can be fatal, as well.

If you are a patient with a potentially fatal disease, he says, “Yesterday morning’s breakthrough may be the key to your life.”

Yet, Gingrich says, the nation’s health care system has been among the last industries to embrace the information age. Coupled with an archaic federal bureaucracy, the result could be an outbreak of avian flu that might have been caught early with state-of-the-art computer analysis, he says.

Gingrich envisions a system that cuts costs and improves care by allowing patients, hospitals, doctors and other medical care providers to share, securely, X-rays, lab results, prescriptions and treatment outcomes almost the instant they become available.

Links to other sites could enable patients to review outcomes for heart valve transplants, for example, between several area hospitals, along with the cost. Florida residents already can. When they were able to compare prescription prices among pharmacies, drug costs plummeted.

“This is the beginning of the future,” he says.

At INHS, a joint venture of Providence Health and Services, Gingrich saw doctors, nurses and pharmacists already doing in the Northwest what he foresees for the nation as a whole.

The organization’s telemedicine network connects dozens of hospitals from Anacortes to Great Falls, Mont., to Twin Falls, Idaho, as well as hundreds of doctors and clinics. They can exchange laboratory results, radiological images and other patient information using personal or handheld computers. Rural hospitals too small to have their own pharmacists can tap into a telepharmacy program that allows them to distribute medicines in compliance with state regulations. Without access to the network, many small hospitals would have to close, striking a blow to rural economies.

In a separate initiative, INHS has assembled a network that oversees worker compensation cases in Washington that so far has cut lost time an estimated 75 percent, and with a fraction of the employees the state dedicates to a similar caseload. Chief Executive Officer Tom Fritz says INHS hopes to expand what has been a pilot program after state officials receive an assessment being prepared by the University of Washington.

As much as Gingrich liked the technology, he may have been more impressed with the cooperation among two health networks, Providence and Empire, that compete for patients every day.

If you want to be success, he says, “start with a visionary idea that puts community and patient interests ahead of institutions.”

He likened the result to the free-wheeling exchange of ideas that brought prosperity to the Silicon Valley. Boston-area high-tech companies fell behind their West Coast counterparts because information was too closely held.

Calling himself a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican,” which might surprise those who recall his days as speaker, Gingrich says the federal government should limit its role in the health care arena to setting standards, then let the states and the private sector figure out how best to meet them at the lowest cost.

“It’s impossible to have a planned change in health,” he says. “It’s too big.”

But if INHS can learn from incoming inquiries as it shares its expertise, the Spokane organization could be the industry leader for the next 15 years.

“It’s remarkable what you’re doing here,” he says.