EHR Data – Is it Improving Healthcare?

I’ve written pretty regularly about the wave of data that’s coming to the world of healthcare. It’s really something quite extraordinary. However, data in itself doesn’t solve anything. So, I was bothered by this tweet which suggested that technology was improving healthcare by illustrating that more and more health data was being collected by technology.

Here’s the tweet:

Attached to this tweet is the following image which doesn’t illustrate the above assertion at all.

No one believes that technology can help improve healthcare more than me. However, it’s not right to make that assertion on Twitter and then use the increased collection of healthcare data as proof of this fact. We can collect all the data in the world and healthcare can remain exactly as it is today.

This reminds me of when the government suggested that HITECH (Meaningful Use) was a success based on graphs that show that most organizations have adopted an EHR. I guess if EHR adoption is your goal, then it was a success. However, if your goal is to use technology to improve healthcare, then EHR adoption is a vanity metric.

We need to stop focusing on adoption and start focusing more on metrics that really matter. Are we improving care? Are we lowering the cost of healthcare? Are we improving the efficiency of our healthcare providers? If technology can’t help you in one of these areas, then we should question why we’re doing it. Let’s bring some sanity back to our approach to healthcare technology.

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.

   

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