EHR

A collection of 12  Posts

Is Meaningful Use working and what can innovators do to help with EHR adoption?

Earlier this year NueMD created a nice looking Meaningful Use Infographic — asking the question whether MU was helping or hurting EHR Adoption. I loved the summary but I wanted to dig in a little further so I asked Dr. William Rusnak, a resident physician in radiology and a healthcare IT writer for NueMD, to tell us what that infographic meant for innovators and folks building solutions. Here’s what Dr. Rusnak said:

I’ve been getting many questions these days about big data tools and solutions, especially their role in healthcare analytics. I think that unless you’re doing large scale analysis of biomedical data such as genomics, it’s probably best to stick with traditional tried and true analytics tools. Online Analytics Processing (OLAP) can be invaluable for medical facilities to use when interpreting data and health informatics because most of that data is in relational, key-value, or hiearchical databases (such as MUMPS).

Melissa McCormack, a medical researcher with EHR consultancy group Software Advice, recently published their medical practice management BuyerView research, which found that 63% of the buyers were replacing existing PM solutions, rather than making a first-time purchase. This mirrors the trend we’ve seen across medical software purchasing, where the HITECH Act may have prompted hasty first purchases of EHR solutions, followed by replacements 1-2 years later. For PM vendors, this means there’s a huge opportunity to market your products to practices as an upgrade, even if they’re already using PM software.

EHR review site Software Advice recently published their 2014 Meaningful Use EHR Market Share Report (a SlideShare version is also available). They reported that in contrast to the buzz about this impending market consolidation, they found a trend toward fragmentation; in fact, the number of vendors in the health space with MU attestations actually grew 25% in the past year alone. The report was nice enough that I reached out to Melissa McCormack from Software Advice to see what further insights we could glean from the report.

I was watching the Super Bowl tonight and lost interest after Bruno Mars’ very nice halftime concert so I started picking up some “Read it Later” articles I saved late last year; one specifically caught my eye. In December the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that Avon is pulling the plug on a $125 million software system rollout which “has been in the works for four years after a test of the system in Canada drove away many of the salespeople who fuel the door-to-door cosmetics company’s revenue”.

I’ve often said that Meaningful Use and the HITECH Act created false demand for EHRs and has (perhaps irrevocably) harmed innovation in the EHR space by standardizing features and function rather than outcomes and expectations. It’s a false demand because it concentrated too much on prescriptive, sometimes useless, and in many cases productivity-killing, functionality instead of focusing on what’s really needed — data interoperability and fostering innovation. John Halamka wrote something similar recently in his Advice to the new ONC chief (highlights in red below are mine, not John’s):

This past Friday I was invited by the Patient Privacy Rights (PPR) Foundation to lead a discussion about privacy and EHRs. The discussion, entitled “Fact vs. Fiction: Best Privacy Practices for EHRs in the Cloud,” addressed patient privacy concerns and potential solutions for doctors working with EHRs. While we are all somewhat disturbed by the slow erosion of privacy in all aspects of our digital lives, the rather rapid loss of patient privacy around health data is especially unnerving because healthcare is so near and dear to us all.

As I travel and speak with physician practices and hospital execs about health IT, I often hear questions about how practices can become paperless as they transition from manual to electronic processes. For those of you that have installed EHRs, you know that going digital does not mean that you’ll be paperless and you’ve probably had to buy more scanners and printers than you originally planned. For those of you that haven’t installed your EHR you’re probably puzzled so let me take a moment to explain why you shouldn’t believe vendors that tell you that you can be completely document-free or paperless in your environment.

Carl Bergman, a seasoned systems analyst and project manager, is Managing Partner of EHRSelector.com and has been sharing a number of ideas for improving EHR usability with me via email. Since I loved his enthusiasm and agreed with his ideas, I invited Carl to share with us some more detail around how to improve the EHR user experience. Here’s what Carl had to say: Earlier this year, we went to an outdoor wedding.

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