Modular Software Unleashes Innovation – Major EHR Developments Per Halamka

In my ongoing series of Major EHR Developments from John Halamka (see my previous EHR In The Cloud post), his second major EHR development from the Technology Review article is: Modular Software Unleashes Innovation. The following excerpt from his article sums it up well:

Until very recently, innovation in medical IT has depended upon the development schedules of a few very large vendors who sell hospital systems with $100 million price tags. In the future, electronic health records will become increasingly modular, similar to the online app stores where consumers download games or programs for their phones.

The idea of modular healthcare IT has been around for a long time. I think I first saw this concept when I learned about a group called the Clinical Groupware Collaborative. I haven’t heard much out of them recently, but every once in a while I see that they’re still working to make Halamka’s comments about modular EHR software a reality.

I’m certain that Judy from Epic would argue that such modular EHR software is a risk to the healthcare industry. She’s probably right. There are risks to modular software. However, there are even more risks and disadvantages associated with a monolithic EHR vendor that won’t interact with other modular clinical software. I believe that one day this will come back to bite Epic as new CIO’s who weren’t part of the $100 million hospital software purchase will start to embrace a more modular strategy.

Turns out that I think providers will actually be the strongest proponents of the modular strategy. They’re already buying mobile devices with money out of their own pockets and so they’re going to start using apps that will help them provide better care. Hospitals will have a hard time controlling it and they’ll eventually realize that the best way to control it is to embrace it.

The most unfortunate part of this EHR development is that it’s going to take a long time for this development to become a reality. However, little by little we’ll get there.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

4 Comments

  • As a tech nerd doc, the best advice I can give to CIOs/CMIOs is to find a framework for ambulatory practices that embraces a BYOEHR (Bring your own EHR) in the same vein of BYOD (Bring your own device). What I mean by that is allow providor choice in purchasing and implementing their own EHR while insuring that a framework is set up for cross communication to interlink records.

    This is to fend off the trend to a one size (Epic) fits all approach in which no one is happy. C-level management needs to realize that if users (providers) are not happy, the promises of savings via efficiency simply will not happen.

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