Over the past 10 years, US hospitals have rapidly adopted Electronic Health Record systems because of federal mandates that included both carrots and sticks. The US federal government pumped 87 billion US dollars into the market by giving multi-million dollar rewards to hospitals that adopted EHR systems and, in 2017, hospitals that have failed to […]
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 […]
Bridging the Communications Gap Between Healthcare and IT
One of the great challenges of Electronic Medical Records adoption is bridging the divide between clinic-speak and IT-speak. For those of us who have worked on both sides of the divide, it is easy to see that even experience cannot reconcile the abundance of information in healthcare and in information technology. What can help is maintaining […]
Ta-blet or Not Ta-blet, That is the Question
In a recent article in Becker’s Health IT & CIO Review, Jessica Cohen reports that according to a report done by IBM Institute for Business Value of healthcare CIOs and other executives, findings indicate that 71% of CIOs and only 59% of other executives believe that mobile solutions will have a significant impact on their organizations […]
Are Computers Getting Ready to Supercede Doctors’ Diagnoses?
A recent small scale study by Harvard Medical School indicates that software symptom-checkers still have a long way to go when identifying the reasons for medical conditions. This result seemed fairly consistent across different software so it is more a statement of the readiness of these systems rather than the accuracy of any one in […]
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 […]