I’m sure that many of you have already seen it, but it made me so happy watching it that I just had to share it for those that hadn’t seen it. Plus, it’s worth a second watch. The employees at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, Oregon put this video together for Breast Cancer Awareness to the song “Down” by Jay Sean. My favorite part of the video is the old man dancing with the broom. Well worth the 3:38.

Check out the following descriptions of the first four EHR vendors to become CCHIT 2011 and Preliminary ARRA EHR certified per Jim Tate’s guest blog post on Hitech Answers:

eHealth Made EASY, Version 3 by eHealth Made EASY, LLC, achieved Preliminary ARRA 2011 Certification for ‘CMS Quality Reporting” in both the Eligible Providers and Hospitals domains. They look to be on track to supply the ‘meaningful use’ reporting functionality across the entire range of platforms. I’m guessing they could become the reporting engine for quite a few hospital systems and EHRs.

KIS Track, Version 5.1, by Kaulkin Information Systems, achieved Preliminary ARRA 2011 Certification for ‘Patient Electronic Access to Health Information’ for Eligible Providers. Looks like they may be getting into the patient portal market.

Medios, Version 4.5, by IOS Health Systems, passed inspection on 27 of 27 objectives for Preliminary 2011 ARRA Certification for Eligible Providers. It appears they are interested in the Ambulatory EHR market.

ABELMed EHR-EMR/PM, Version 11, by ABEL Medical Software Inc., is the first EHR vendor to achieve the CCHIT 2011 Comprehensive Ambulatory Certification. Usability testing is now a part of the CCHIT Ambulatory Certification and in this area ABELMed scored 4 out of 5 stars.

My personal takeaways:

Takeaway #1: Four EHR vendors and I’ve only really heard of one of the four. Sifting through all the EHR vendors is just going to get more and more difficult.

Takeaway #2: How will these vendors and the users of these EMR vendors feel if HHS comes out with some drastically different or drastically simplified criteria for EHR certification?

In the comments of a previous post Fred gave the following advice about your IT support during an EMR implementation, “you can pay a little more upfront and be done with it or pay more over the long haul and never be happy.

My only caution with this is advice is that paying more isn’t always better. This is particularly true when you’re talking about what you pay for the advice you get from an IT person. However, I think Fred’s point is that if you scrimp on some of the technology up front it can come back to haunt you. Regardless of how much you pay, you need to make sure your IT person knows what they’re talking about.

An example of paying too little up front is if you purchase a computer with too little RAM. Some things you can cut back on. Feel free to get a smaller hard drive. Do you REALLY need the DVD burner with Blue-ray? Usually not, but skimping on something like RAM will make you miserable. Then, your computer will slow down your EMR and your next call to your EMR vendor you’ll say, “Your EMR is SLOW!!!” when in fact it’s just you spent too little money up front on the important things.