Category: Commentary

$400 Million Boondoggle

Another Boondoggle. As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on 12/15/2016: “A huge project to modernize medical record-keeping for California prison inmates has more than doubled in cost from original estimates to nearly $400 million in just three years, the latest in a long string of computer projects that have befuddled state government.” Even for those […]

Escaping the EHR Trap

In a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Escaping the EHR Trap – the Future of Health IT“, Dr. Kenneth Mandi and Dr. Isaac Kohane present a strong argument for disruptive change in the EHR space as follows: “Health IT vendors should adopt modern technologies wherever possible. Clinicians choosing products in […]

Paper, Paper Everywhere but Not a Drop of Ink

A recent article on medium.com titled “UCSF Nurses Want Someone To Build These Products” By Fiahna Cabana, Desiree Matloob, and Priyanka Agarwal includes the following: ‘Frontline nurses attend to almost all of a patient’s basic needs. In doing so, they often juggle up to 25 pieces of paper with critical information. Ideally, nurses could use […]

VA Ready to Junk Vista

For as long as anyone can remember, the US Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA) has managed patient data on VistA, their EHR system that was started in the 1970s. VistA consists of 180 different applications for clinical, financial, administrative and infrastructure functions in the VA. The Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) represents the common clinical graphical […]

Garbage in Ratings Out

As CMS continues to evolve quality reporting requirements for hospitals and nursing homes, the law of unintended consequences can come into play as administrators struggle to raise their ratings. In a recent article on Bloomberg News titled New CMS Nursing Home Ratings Don’t Solve Accuracy Issues, Senator Michael Williamson reports the following: “Increasing the number of measures […]

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

In a recent article on emrdailynews.com titled “EHR Re-evaluation and Replacement is on the Rise”, Stephen Campbell reports that the replacement market for EHR systems is being driven by ‘systems that are too complex (in form and function)’ and the trend to cloud-hosted systems that run on mobile devices. He defines the ‘Goldilocks’ Principle as […]