HISTalk posted the following about Allscripts EMR and MISYS EMR:

From Doofus: “Re: Allscripts. Word on the street that Allscripts is sending a letter to Misys EMR clients stating that they will not make MISYS EMR compliant with ARRA guidelines and that these clients will need to move to the Allscripts family of products. Fees are in the area of $2,500 per provider and a fee per practice. Training and data conversion are not included but are discounted.” A contact there says word on the street is wrong. Since meaningful use hasn’t been defined, Allscripts hasn’t made any statement about the likelihood of MEMR being compliant or what they’ll do (or offer) if it isn’t. Maybe there was some confusion over an ongoing offer to those MEMR customers who would like to upgrade to one of the company’s better products at their convenience.

This sounds like playing on words to me. I attended the Alllscripts tour…errr I mean the EHR stimulus tour. There were many Misys EMR users that told me they pretty much had to move to Allscripts EMR. Maybe it’s not being forced to move. However, when you’re working on EMR software that won’t be updated, that’s pretty much being forced to move in my book.

This story is pretty incredible:

A new care record system has contributed to thousands of patients from Barts and the London NHS Trust potentially breaching the national 18-week referral to treatment time target.

The trust is facing a backlog of 23,000 potential breaches, and although it says the situation is improving – and it has resumed reporting on 18-week waits – it may “fail for the delivery of 18 weeks in 2009-10”.

Problems with the Cerner Millennium CRS, combined with poor trust data and procedures, are responsible for the problems.

In August, the backlog of admitted patients stood at 1,700. The trust also reported having a “non-admitted backlog of 26,640 on pathways”. This required validation as many were duplicates. The number has since reduced to about 23,000 cases.

The problems date back to the implementation of Cerner Millennium last April. By September 2008, the trust was projecting a £3m shortfall in income due to data, reporting and technical problems with its BT-provided system.

The trust has since introduced new systems and processes to manage patients and an 18-week patient tracking list. These are backed by weekly review by each speciality within the hospital. Trauma and Orthopaedics is the speciality with the highest number of backlogs.

The trust says that the sheer scale of case backlog will make it very difficult to clear, with seeing and treating patients likely to lead to a “dip in performance”.

The scale of the problem means some patients may be kept waiting for more than six months, twice the national target for treatment. An August trust paper states: “It was acknowledged that 26-week breaches may occur due to the quantum of the non admitted backlog.”

EMR is great when it works, but when it doesn’t this type of stuff happens. Although, it’s really hard to imagine missing 26,000+ cases. WOW!

The following is an expert from the press release by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) about EMR data:

Hundreds of billions of gigabytes of health information are now being collected in electronic medical records, and three-quarters (76%) of more than 700 healthcare executives recently surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP agree that the secondary use of this information will be their organization’s greatest asset over the next five years. The data that could be mined from the health system can improve patient care, predict public health trends and reduce healthcare costs, but PricewaterhouseCoopers finds lack of standards, privacy concerns and technology limitations are holding back progress.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the healthcare industry won’t see the full value of investments in electronic medical records and other health IT investments until it finds secondary uses for the information being gathered. Yet 90 percent of executives surveyed feel the industry needs better guidelines about how health information can be used and shared, and 76 percent feel that national stewardship over, or responsibility for, the use of the health data should be regulated.

In its newly published report “Transforming Healthcare through Secondary Use of Health Data,” PricewaterhouseCoopers calls for public-private collaboration and a role for government in creating incentives for the private sector to collect, share and use health data; to establish standards; and to redefine technical architecture to allow interoperability.

This is an interesting press release about connecting 7,000 physicians and 13 hospitals EHR systems together. Although, the most glaring part is the $400 million it will take to make it happen. Here’s the press release:

“The North Shore-LIJ Health System announced today it is subsidizing up to 85 percent of the cost of implementing and operating an Electronic Health Records (EHR) system in the offices of its more than 7,000 affiliated physicians in New York City and Long Island — part of a $400 million investment to strengthen the quality of care throughout the region by automating inpatient and outpatient records in all medical settings, including 13 hospitals. In implementing the largest EHR program in the New York metropolitan area and one of the largest in the nation, North Shore-LIJ will provide physicians with individual subsidies of up to $40,000 over five years.”

Michael J. Dowling, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of the North Shore-LIJ Health System said “We’re not going to measure our return-on-investment (ROI) in terms of dollars and cents; our ROI will be based on our ability to improve patient outcomes.”

“Glen Tullman, CEO of Allscripts, noted that providing physicians with real-time care guidelines via the EHR increases the probability of achieving fundamental improvements in the quality of patient care.”

John Bosco, North Shore-LIJ’s chief information officer said “the Allscripts’ EHR will connect to a separate inpatient clinical information system from Eclipsys Corporation that North Shore-LIJ is deploying at its hospitals and other facilities.”