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Telemedicine Not Connecting With EMRs

As smartphones and tablets become a standard part of healthcare as we know it, telemedicine is gaining a new foothold in medicine too.  In some cases, we’re talking off the cuff transactions in which, say, a patient e-mails a photo to a doctor who can then diagnose and prescribe.  But telemedicine is also taking root on an institutional level, with health systems rolling out projects across the country.

The problem is, however, that these telemedicine projects simply don’t integrate with EMRs, according to an article in SearchHealthIT.  The piece’s writer, Don Fluckinger, recently attended American Telemedicine Association’s 2013 Annual International Meeting & Trade Show, where complaints were rife that EMRs and telemedicine don’t interoperate.

I really liked this summary of the situation one executive shared with Fluckinger:

For now, the executive (who asked not to be named) said, telemedicine providers need to keep away from the “blast radius” of EHR vendor conflicts, lest their budgets get consumed by building interfaces to the various non-interoperable EHR systems.

Not only are health systems struggling to integrate telemedicine data with EMRs, telemedicine providers are in a bit of a difficult spot too, Fluckinger notes. As an example, he tells the tale of Seattle-based Carena Inc., a provider of primary care services to patients via phone and video, which provides after-hours support to physicians at Franciscan Health System in Tacoma, Wash.

Carena itself has an EMR which has the ability to share searchable PDF documents for use in patient EMRs, but Franciscan’s seven hospitals are bringing up an Epic implementation which can’t support this trick.  Top execs at Franciscan want to connect Carena’s data to Epic, but that won’t happen right away.  So Franciscan may end up setting up Carena’s after-hours service within Franciscan’s Epic installation to work around the interoperability problem.

This is just one sample of the interoperability obstacles healthcare organizations are encountering when they set out to create a telemedicine service. As telemedicine explodes with the use of portable devices, I can only imagine that this will impose one more pressure on vendors to conquer compatibility problems. (But sadly, I doubt it will force any real changes in the near future.)

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June 5, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: EHR  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  EMR Technology  Healthcare  Healthcare IT  Hospitals  mHealth  Telemedicine
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Getting Your EMR’s UI/UX RIght

A couple of weeks ago, someone posted an interesting question on the buzzing question and answer site Quora.com: Is there room for any more new EMRs in the insanely crowded marketplace we have today? According to one very sharp medical student who’s keeping an eye on the field, the best response isn’t “yes,” or “no,” but “you’ve got the wrong question.”

His answer, which I’d like to share with you, argues that there’s no point whatsoever trying to introduce a new EMR with a shiny new feature set when none of the existing field have a decent UI/UX right now. Jae Won Joh then lays out the steps he believes vendors should take if they want to get the basic UI/UX right (steps excerpted for brevity):

Step 0: Architect the patient data structure carefully
I mention this because you’re going to need to be able to pass this patient data around for clinical use, billing, research, auditing, etc, so design for flexibility and expandability from the get-go. Too many EMRs make it painfully obvious that things were thrown in as afterthoughts.

Step 1: Decide on your market…
…because you need to do everything possible to totally kill it. It’s the only way to go. If you’re going to take on group practices, great, take on group practices. If you’re going to work the hospital scene, fine, work the hospital scene. Stop trying to make something that does everything everywhere. This is not a feature, it’s a horrible bug.

Step 2: Analyze what your market does
If it’s a hospital, you need multiple classes of user, ranging all the way from student to nurse to physician to administrator. You’ll also want a competent notification system, because inpatient things tend to be more urgent and if the ICU patient’s potassium is critically high, you probably want to warn the physician immediately instead of waiting for the physician to check on it manually, because gee, the patient might code and die before that happens….The concerns are different for an outpatient scenario: you don’t need a lot of the stuff that hospitals require in an office. Less orders, more scripts, greater throughput in terms of number of patients, scheduling functionality, etc.

Step 3a: Abstract workflows to a very high level first
In other words, they are as follows: 
1) read data
2) interpret data
3) input data

There’s really not much else to it. Every workflow is a permutation of those three. For example: a physician orders a lab, and it’s performed. The result is read by the tech who provides the input to the system, where it is then read and interpreted by the physician so they can go from there. Figure out how each workflow revolves around these three abstractions.

<excerpted>

Step 3c: Design for a 5-year-old
If a five-year old couldn’t use your UI, you screwed up. Period.

There’s a lot more to Joh’s answer, and I suggest you hit Quora youself and read his entire piece. When it comes to usability, most EMRs have barely scratched the surface, and talking about these issues more is always a Good Thing.

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June 4, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: EHR  EHR Market  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  EMR Technology  Healthcare  Healthcare IT  Healthcare IT Market
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EHRs Don’t Support Key Parts of Practice

Ideally, EHRs make the clinical exams more efficient and effective, ultimately saving or even making more money for medical practices.  But the reality is that they bypass other parts of the patient encounter where much of the costs and inefficiencies are generated, according to a whitepaper by athenahealth, “The Economics of Patient Workflow: Cracking the Code of Successful EHR Design.”

As the paper notes, 100 percent of practice revenue is generated by the patient exam. Other stages of managing a practice, such as orders and results management, generate 30 percent to 40 percent of costs but no revenue at all. So having an EHR in place which does little to improve exam efficiency — or actually reduces it — is a dangerous thing to do to a practice.

Worse, as the paper points out, there are some major flaws with typical, software-based EHRs:

* They’re too expensive:  Typical cost is $33,000 per physician plus $1,500 per doctor per month for maintenance.

* They don’t save money because they slow doctors down:  Most EHRs force physicians to do a lot of data entry, much in time-consuming, structured formats.

* They aren’t designed to manage the P4P cycle seamlessly:  With most EHRs, doctors have to dig out the data needed to create pay for performance reports.

* They usually don’t offer an efficient, closed-loop solution to the problem of monitoring paper and electronic orders and results:  Remember, orders and result management generates as much as 40 percent of practice expenses.  EHRs’ failure to make such tracking efficient is a major obstacle for medical practices.

* Few EHRs support follow-up work from orders and results effectively:  Most EHRs don’t include built-in management and tracking of patient communications, forcing providers to do inefficient and potentially risky manual follow-up.

The white paper goes on to make the argument that there are several reasons why Web-based EHRs solve these problems, largely by requiring no up front cost, using up less physician time on data entry, optimizing collection of data for P4P programs, digitizing all paperwork and tracking practice results.

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June 3, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: EHR  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  EMR Technology  Healthcare  Healthcare IT  Pay for Performance  Revenue Cycle Management
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Health IT and Worker Burnout — #HITsm Chat Highlights

We continue to test various methods to incorporate video into the #HITsm chats. This week a few of us got together to talk about what was said during the #HITsm chat. You can see the video embedded below. It was pretty fun to kind of wrap up what was tweeted during the #HITsm chat. Let us know what you think of the video below. We’re definitely interested in knowing if people like the videos or not. Plus, if you’re interested in participating in one, let us know as well.

Topic One: How might #healthIT CONTRIBUTE to #healthcare worker burnout (#EHR fatigue, etc.)?

 

Topic Two: How are #healthcare worker burnout factors tracked & measured today (or ARE they)?

 

Topic Three: How could/should #healthcare worker burnout factor into #healthIT design principles?

 

Topic Four: How could #healthIT improve the provider experience (reducing burnout risk)?

Topic Five: Should patients have access to #healthcare provider burnout factor ratings & mitigation plans?

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June 1, 2013 I Written By

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

Filed Under: EHR  EMR  EMR Technology  Healthcare IT  mHealth
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EMR Alert Fatigue Can Have Deadly Consequences

A case study published this week in the journal Pediatrics suggests that EMR alert fatigue is becoming a major source of potential medical errors.  According to a piece in iHealthBeat, “a deluge of repetitive, inappropriate alerts” have been generated by EMRs of late, causing clinicians to ignore or override alerts very frequently.

Problems with alerting in medication order entry systems are proving to be a particularly serious safety hazard, it seems.  ”It has been well established that clinicians override many drug allergy alerts generated by the electronic health record,” write the authors of the Pediatrics study.

The case study in Pediatrics comes from researchers at Stanford University Biomedical Informatics and Harvard Medical School.  Researchers examined the case of a two-year-old boy who died after clinical staff overrode scores of distracting EMR alerts — more than 100 over the course of one month — and ended up inappropriately administering a diuretic to the patient.

The key to addressing this  problem appears to be zeroing in on approaches to minimize the number of non-evidence based alerts that bedevil physicians during their time with patients. However, implementing these changes can be very complex.

In the PICU researchers were observing for their study, the facility made evidence-based allergy alerting alerts to the hospital’s system. However, that’s just one aspect of a multifaceted problem.  As the authors note, “incorporating clinical evidence in electronic drug allergy alerting systems remains challenging, especially in pediatric settings.”

But given that pediatric patients usually can’t themselves alert doctors or nurses when the wrong drug comes to hand, this seems like it should be a priority when looking at ways to reduce EMR alert fatigue.

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May 31, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: EHR  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  EMR Technology  Healthcare IT  Hospitals
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BYOD Deploying a Mobile Device Management Strategy

The following is a guest blog post by Marcus LaFountain.
Marcus LaFountain Headshot
LaFountain has worked in IT for the last 10 years as a PC Technician, Help Desk Analyst, and System Administrator. He is currently a Healthcare IT Consultant specializing in Cerner and HIM implementations.

A recent Ovum study showed that almost 60% of employees bring some type of mobile device into the workplace. There are a few names for this, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Bring Your Own PC (BYOPC), Bring Your Own Phone (BYOP), User Introduces Unsecure Device onto My Network and Then Loses My Secure Data (UIUDOMNTLMSD). Alright, so I made that last one up, but that is how most IT Managers feel when the discussion is started about BYOD. An end user bringing a device to work is both a gift and a curse for any sized company. We see an increase in productivity but also the increased threat of data being lost or stolen. Having a strong Mobile Device Management (MDM) strategy can help companies reap the benefits of BYOD while limiting the consequences.

Let’s start by going over some numbers. By 2014, the number of mobile devices (mostly mobile phones) in the workplace is expected to reach 350 million globally. A remarkable 57% of full time employees are already using mobile devices for work related tasks. Out of that 57%, about half is unmonitored, unmanaged BYOD activity. Another study shows that in 2011, 78% of companies did NOT have a BYOD policy and only about 20% of employees actually sign a BYOD policy.

There are many reasons to justify a BYOD policy:

Productivity:  An employee who uses their personal device for both work and play is on average likely to work an extra 240 hours per year than those who do not. They can answer emails on the go, answer phone calls while on the road (using a hands-free device of course!) and receive that last minute meeting update. . Most employees won’t want to bring a work laptop home just to check emails after dinner or during downtime at home. Letting them receive push emails may empower them to write a quick mail back to a client in a different time zone rather than having to wait until the morning.

Cost: There is also a cost justification. Not having to provide every employee with a business only device can save not only the cost of the device but the monthly service plan that goes along with it. The number of devices can be reduced as well. A mobile phone is a cheaper and sometimes more convenient alternative than a laptop with a 4G cell card. Employees can still stay connected when not physically at their desk.

User Experience: Tech Savvy employees tend to have strong preferences when it comes to the technology they choose to use. Forcing an Android user to use a BlackBerry device may not be an ideal situation. Giving employees the ability to choose their mobile operating system, screen size and other technical specs may make them more likely to use the device rather than it sitting in a desk drawer unused.

However, it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows in the world of BYOD. As the use of mobile devices increase in the work place, so do the number of malicious attacks. According to the Ponemon Institute, 6 out of 10 security breaches were traced back to mobile devices. Apple and Google are constantly removing mobile malware from their app stores. And as always, attackers are trying to pick the low hanging fruit of the mobile community first. Businesses must have policies and security measures in place to protect their data. In 2009, the US Government enacted the Health Information Technology for Clinical Health Act (HITECH) that requires healthcare companies to notify patients if they have had their health records compromised. Similar acts were also put in place in the financial industry.

Constructing a comprehensive Mobile Device Management (MDM) policy is imperative when users are allowed to bring and use their own devices. As with many policies, the contents may vary greatly by company. However, almost every company from small businesses to enterprises will need to focus on security and support.

Security:  A lost or stolen device is the most common type of security breach. A company must have measures in place to combat this. While an entire article can be written about mobile security, I will touch on some common features.  Both Android and Apple offer AES 256 – Bit encryption as a standard on their devices.  Lock screens, passwords and certificates all play a role in device management as well. Microsoft Active Sync and other software also allow administrators to perform a remote wipe of a compromised device. This is a necessary requirement when employees have company data on their mobile phones.  Samsung has developed an Enterprise suite called SAFE that allows the user to partition company data with personal data. It also gives administrators the ability to perform a complete or selective wipe, tracking of the device and local password enforcement.  Apple and other mobile providers are starting to or already have incorporated these features as well. If your company is using application virtualization, you may need to define new rules for allowing mobile devices. Users will also need a way to get a hold of someone 24/7 in the event of a lost or stolen device.

Support:  This may be a slippery slope for some. Most IT policies only allow for support of company devices. So who supports a personal device that is used for business? Depending on the size of your company, you may want to assign a dedicated resource from your IT Security team to manage your MDM policy. If you are an enterprise, you may need a small team to manage different aspects of the policy. Your Help Desk will need training on the various mobile operating systems and communication will need to be sent out to end users on how to stay on top of security. Documentation will need to be created on how to setup email, VPNs and passwords. Do you need to setup an approved device list or will you allow any manufacturer or mobile OS on the network? A pilot group (usually IT) will need to be put in place to test your new systems and policies as well. Audits should also be enabled to check for OS updates, application updates and security updates.

In a growing mobile market and the on demand nature of business today, IT Management will need to be one step ahead of its users by developing a MDM policy. When developing an MDM strategy, you must take into account your business needs as well as infrastructure requirements. Like any new implementation it is ideal to begin testing your technology and policies with a small subset of users and conducting a review process before rolling out corporate wide. Doing so may limit mistakes while in a beta phase instead of having them on a mass scale. Focusing on security and support will allow for a comprehensive strategy that will allow employees to operate efficiently and productively but most importantly safely.

Related Whitepaper:
How Technology Executives are Managing the Shift to BYOD
This white paper looks at the growing adoption of BYOD in healthcare and the possible benefits and hurdles of enabling employees to use their own consumer devices in the workplace.

Download Whitepaper or see More EMR and Health IT Whitepapers

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April 30, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 5000 articles with John having written over 2000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 9.3 million times. John also recently launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and Google Plus.

Filed Under: BYOD  EMR Technology  Healthcare IT  mHealth
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DoD Official Challenges Agency’s EMR Approach

Back in 2009, the Department of Defense and the VA began an initiative, the iEHR project, which was supposed to integrate the two sprawling agencies’ EMR systems.  That initiative came to a halt in February, with the two organizations deciding make their two independent systems more interoperable and the data contained wtihin more shareable.

At least one DoD official, however, believes that the latest effort flies in the face of President Obama’s directive that agencies adopt and use open data standards. J. Michael Gilmore, director of the DoD’s operational test and evaluation office, has sent a memo to Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter arguing that the DoD’s plan to evaluate commercial EMR systems is “manifestly inconsistent” with that order.

“The White House has repeatedly recommended that the Department take an inexpensive and direct approach to implementing the President’s open standards,” Gilmore wrote. “Unfortunately, the Department’s preference is to purchase proprietary software for so-called “core” health management functions…To adhere to the President’s agenda, the iEHR program should be reorganized and the effort to define and purchase “core” functions in the near term be abandoned.”

If the DoD actually manages to successfully implement a commercial EMR system, it “would be the exception to the rule, given the Department’s consistently poor performance whenever it has attempted wholesale replacement of existing business processes with commercially derived enterprise software,” Gilmore noted tartly.

Gilmore recommends that the DoD go the open standards route by defining and testing the iEHR architecture, then purchasing a software “layer” to connect DoD’s EMR with other providers using open standards.

The VA, meanwhile, has formally proposed that the DoD migrate from its existing AHLTA EMR to the VA’s popular VistA EMR, already in place successfully throughout the agency’s hospitals and clinics. VistA is deployed at more than 1,500 sites of care, including 152 hospitals, 965 outpatient clinics, 133 community living centers and 293 Vet Centers.

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April 26, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: EHR  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  EMR Adoption  EMR Technology  Healthcare  Healthcare IT
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100% Interoperability, Quantified Self Data, and Data Liquidity – #HITsm Chat Highlights

Topic 1: Do you think the healthcare system WANTS 100% interoperability & data liquidity? Why/why not?

 

Topic 2: As consumer, what are YOUR fears about your health data being shared across providers/payers/government?

 

Topic 3: What do you think payers will do with #quantifiedself data if integrated into EHR? Actuarial/underwriting?

 

Topic 4: Could there be a correlation between your fear of data liquidity and your health?

 

Topic 5: What could assuage your fears? Education? Legislation? Regulation? Healthcare system withdrawal?

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March 30, 2013 I Written By

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

Filed Under: EHR  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  EMR Technology  Healthcare  Healthcare IT  Healthcare Social Media  Hospitals  Meaningful Use  mHealth  Outcomes  Privacy
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Tech We Take for Granted in Healthcare

Every once in a while I like to take a step back and think about all the tech that we take for granted. Yes, it’s easy to get stuck in the discussions of what’s missing from our tech life or ways in which tech could be implemented better in healthcare. However, there’s a whole series of technologies that we use all the time and barely give it a second thought.

Certainly there are some rural areas of the country where their internet connection isn’t very good, but for a large portion of healthcare a nice internet connection is just a feature. Most clinics don’t give their internet connection a second though. It just works. They go online and do what they need to do. Sure, you might have an outage here or there (and those are brutal), but most of the time the internet just works.

Related to this is Wifi. Unless you’re in a clinic where the wifi implementation isn’t very good (and there are still plenty of those), you roam around with your laptop, tablet or other wireless device and it just works. It’s amazing to watch my kids, because they really don’t have any idea on how it works. They just open up the iPad and watch movies as they wish. They literally have no idea what’s required to make that possible. Yep, they take it for granted because the tech has become so good.

We’re now starting to see the next level of ubiquitous internet with 4G speeds being nearly as good as Wifi for many applications. Soon we’ll be taking for granted that we can get good internet speeds almost everywhere we go. The same is true for cell phone connection. The only time I can remember looking at my phone to see how many bars I had was when I was deep in the heart of a National Park. Yes, there are a few places in the wilderness where phone coverage is not likely to hit. However, for 99% of most people’s activities the phone just works.

Another great example is email. I totally take for granted that email just works. If I send an email I assume it’s going to be delivered. Sure, there are times when your email service provider goes down and we have to deal with spam folders, but I don’t really give much thought to whether my email is going to work or not. I just do it all day every day and it just works.

Instant Messenger is another application I use that just works. I know some healthcare institutions that use it, but so far not for PHI. It’s amazing technology that I can see whenever someone is online and send them a message. They can reply almost instantly. The beauty is that most people have become really mature with the use of this technology. It’s a use as needed thing. I don’t greet every person that comes online, but it’s there if I need to get a hold of someone quickly.

Often related to IM is video chats. Unfortunately this hasn’t taken hold very much in healthcare and it’s unfortunate. Video is built into most IM platforms: Skype, Gchat, MSN Messenger (or whatever it’s called now). With video cameras built into so many laptops or desktop cameras available for as cheap as $30, doing a video chat with someone is almost trivial. Add in things like FaceTime on the iPad and the idea of doing a video chat with anyone anytime you want is almost here.

I’m sure there are a hundred other technologies that I could list. The reason I find this so fascinating is that I think we’re going to have the same thing happen with EMR. In the next 5 years, EMR is just going to be another technology that we use without really even thinking about it. We’re not there yet, but it will happen.

I look forward to the day when we start to take EHR for granted.

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March 26, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 5000 articles with John having written over 2000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 9.3 million times. John also recently launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and Google Plus.

Filed Under: EHR  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  EMR Technology  Healthcare  Healthcare IT
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Adding “Social Documentation” To EMRs

While EMRs store key clinical information, a vast amount of clinical communication goes on outside the system, via instant message, text, e-mail, fax, phone and social media.

Most health IT managers don’t concern themselves much with the chatter outside the EMR, other than to see that — where possible — it takes place in a secure manner. But according to John Halamka, MD, chief information officer for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, this communication is too important to be ignored.

Rather than let these conversations stream on without ever entering the EMR, he argues that it’s time to begin mining these discussions and integrating them into the EMR.  As he sees it, smart devices, the cloud, instant messaging, SaaS and social networking should be combined to create what he calls “social documentation” for healthcare.

Just what is social documentation?  Here’s his definition:

I define “social documentation” as team authored care plans, annotated event descriptions (ranging from acknowledging a test result to writing about the patient’s treatment progress), and process documentation (orders, alerts/reminders) sufficient to support care coordination, compliance/regulatory requirements, and billing.

So, in social documentation, the various channels clinicians are already using to connect with each other go from ancillary information to key ingredients in a team approach to care. But Halamka breaks it down further. Social documentation, he says:

*Incorporates data input from multiple team members, reducing the documentation burden for each participant
*Eliminates redundant entry of the same information by different caregivers (nurse, pcp, specialist, resident, social worker)
*Supports Wikipedia like summaries (jointly authored statement of history, plans, and decision making)
*Supports Facebook/Twitter like updates i.e. “Patient developed a fever, ordered workup, will start antibiotics”
*Incorporates data already present in the EHR such as orders and results without having to re-describe them in narrative form

I don’t know about you, but to me this makes enormous sense. As Halamka himself concedes, creating a new modular architecture that can support such documents might be “burdensome” but it’s still something to bear in mind as we move forward.

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March 11, 2013 I Written By

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Filed Under: EHR  Electronic Health Record  Electronic Medical Record  EMR  EMR Technology  Healthcare IT  Healthcare Social Media
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