Today I got a call from an executive recruiter who wanted to know, in essence, where the EMR market was going.  Aside from the usual chatter about Meaningful Use, talent shortages and HITECH, one question she asked made me think: “What do you think is the main thing someone like me should know about the health IT market.”

Having pondered this for a while, I realized that the answer is fairly simple. Above all, anyone who wants to understand health IT needs to know two things: a) That health IT leaders need to be change leaders, more than ever before in the industry and, more importantly, b) that the EMR is at version 0.5 when it comes to maturity and integration into the life of most hospitals.

Yes, I mean version 0.5. We’re talking barely in beta, when it comes to solid integration, staff training, enough institutional knowledge so people can share and learn and a high-performing system that doctors love.  Sure, a few hospitals (1 percent, as I recall) have reached that legendary HIMSS Analytics stage 7, but most are lucky to have gotten their Meaningful Use Stage 1 payment into the door.

When you consider that a large number of CIOs doubt they have the man/women power to complete their Stage 1 implementation, the picture looks even grimmer.  Not only are the EMRs immature, they’re largely being implemented and run by consultants who will cut and run with their experience bank, as they have little ability to share it other than in (to staff and doctors at least) boring reports.

Bottom line, I’d argue that it will be a whopping five to seven years, at least, before EMRs meet either HIMSS Analytics criteria for maturity or my personal Zieger seat-of-the-pants model.  I hate to say that it could even be 10 years, but I see it as a possibility.

The reality is, government can be powerful, and big financial incentives are tasty, but you can’t force an industry to change overnight just because it would be really, really cool.

MU Stage 1 has found some slow-moving and grudging acceptance. According to this news brief from Fierce EMR, a good 42% of providers offices have already attested for MU Stage 1, while another 17% plan to attest within the next year. However, there is also a large number – 39% – who have no plans to do so in the near feature.

The reasons cited include changing technological requirements and budgetary concerns. And in the midst of all this drama, CMS is waiting in the wings with Stage 2 Meaningful Use. The Stage 2 Requirements will be published in the Federal Register on March 4 (Here’s a good meaningful use stage 2 summary for providers).

Are we truly ready for MU Part Deux? I’m not sure we are, and I’m not sure that’s the right question to ask. I’m almost giddy with the promise that MU Stage 2 offers – with greater interchange of information, in standardized formats, and public health reporting realizing its full potential. Maybe a few years into the future, I’ll break a leg skiing in the Swiss Alps and my attending physician there will be able to look up my EHR on his local software. I mean Stage 2 doesn’t come with promises of true international portability of data, but getting past Stage 2 will mean we’re that much closer to true health information flow (if we get state exchanges to effectively exchange information or significant benefits to public health reporting, CMS will declare MU Stage 2 a success.)

Even if you think MU is a load of bunk, you can still be an essential part of the process by participating in the comment stage.

Here’s a direct link to MU Stage 2 rundown published by CMS. The document has details on how you can send CMS your comments.

All comments will go on the regulations.gov website. I’m going to be watching that space in the next two months.

Valentine’s Day may be behind us, but I still wonder how many providers would be willing to write love notes to their EHR vendors, especially with rumors swirling that CMS will release Meaningful Use Stage 2 requirements in the next few weeks. (John Moore at Chilmark Research is apparently taking bets via Twitter, if anyone’s interested in doing a bit of gambling in preparation for the big HIMSS event in Vegas next week. He predicts it will be the Friday after HIMSS. I think it might just make good fodder for Farzad Mostashari’s keynote next Thursday morning, as he has been vocal about delaying the start of Stage 2 until 2014.)

Whether they’re released during or after the show, I decided it would be a good idea to bone up on Stage 1 versus Stage 2, and how what may or may not be included in Stage 2 will lead providers to love (or hate) their systems all the more.

I fortunately came across a very well written and comprehensive (though not too long) report from CSC entitled “Moving Ahead with Stage 2 of Meaningful Use,” which provides a very clear-cut picture of the challenges providers found with Stage 1, and what they are likely to encounter as challenges in Stage 2. It’s a brief, informative read that I highly recommend folks take a look at before they head to HIMSS in just a few days.

My biggest take away from the report was that the providers surveyed had done very little in Stage 1 to engage patients and coordinate care, which is not surprising given that most were concentrating on getting their EHRs up and running in time to fully attest for Stage 1. Combine this with the fact that formal ACO rules weren’t released until late last year, and I can understand why engaging patients and coordinating care just wasn’t on the radar of most healthcare facilities.

But oh what a difference a few months can make! The CSC report notes “Stage 2 is coming soon and a full year of operational use of capabilities will be required (rather than three months for Stage 1). Waiting until the final rule is issued to start moving is simply not an option.

“Now is the time for organizations to work in earnest to build capabilities to engage patients, coordinate care and electronically report on quality.”

And finally, the report notes that:

Three essential areas where organizations need to start now are:

1. Providing patients with access to their health information electronically through patient portals or directly from EHR systems.
2. Electronic capture of physician notes, including diagnosis and treatment, plus rationale for excluding patients from treatment recommendations.
3. Exchange of patient information at transitions in care.

I’d be interested to hear from our readers that have successfully attested for Stage 1 how they view these predictions for Stage 2. Are they manageable? Do they fit with your organization’s current strategy? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

I’ve been inundated with two things as of late – HIMSS12 planning and all things business intelligence. I’ve spent the last few weeks helping prepare the Porter Research team for a webinar on providers’ perceptions of business intelligence, which I’m sure will be a big theme at HIMSS. As I’ve been looking over data from the latest Porter Research survey on BI, I’ve realized that providers know they need it but many aren’t quite sure how to define it, what they need out of it, how to implement it, or how to go about making it meaningful for their organization’s particular needs. And vendors in the healthcare space seem to be (or so I thought) just getting into the game of developing these sorts of tools – be they on a departmental or enterprise level.

Micky Tripathi, President and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC) – a nonprofit healthcare IT advisory and consultancy firm – alerted me to an interesting business intelligence tool called popHealth during my recent interview with him for a Porter Research feature on that state’s developing health information exchange. The MAeHC team, which includes among its services the MAeHC Quality Data Center, will be part of the Interoperability Showcase at HIMSS12, and will help to highlight the functionality and accuracy of the popHealth tool.

“popHealth was originally created as an open-source quality measurement tool by the Primary Care Information Project in New York City,” explained Tripathi, “which was headed at the time by Dr. Farzad Mostashari. Now that he’s the national coordinator for health IT, he’s been promoting it at a national level as a free, open-source tool that any organization in the country can use to send their clinical data to and get Meaningful Use clinical quality measures out of.”

Since then, the ONC has contracted with the Mitre Corporation to further develop the platform for a national user base.

You can of course check out the popHealth website for more info, but in a nutshell, the tool is “an open source reference implementation software service that automates the reporting of Meaningful Use quality measures. popHealth integrates with a healthcare provider’s electronic health record (EHR) system using continuity of care records. popHealth streamlines the automated generation of summary quality measure reports on the provider’s patient population.

“popHealth supports healthcare providers and EHR vendors by reporting clinical quality measures from electronic health record continuity of care files. Providers are empowered to better understand, and analyze the health of their patient population, and meet Meaningful Use reporting objectives, through reports of clinical quality measures. EHR vendors and healthcare providers are free to download, use, and integrate the popHealth software in their systems.”

The popHealth team will at HIMSS also to announce the winner of their tool development challenge. Announced last fall, the competition challenges participants to “develop an application that leverages the popHealth open source framework, existing functionality, standards and sample datasets to improve patient care and provide greater insight into patient populations.”

As the need for business intelligence tools and demand for open source solutions grow, I’ll be interested to see if popHealth ushers in a new era of reporting – one that everyone can take advantage of thanks to its non-existent price tag.

Earlier this year I had the good fortune (and the support of my employer) to join the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), an organization that offers interest groups for every possible IT niche you can think of. I’ve attended a few of their health society events, and at every one I’m confronted with statistics and anecdotes surrounding the dearth of qualified healthcare IT professionals in the city and surrounding areas. Much attention at these events is also given to the fact that these professionals are needed now more than ever to help smaller physician practices and larger healthcare systems demonstrate Meaningful Use and achieve associated electronic medical record (EMR) adoption goals.

I’ve commented before on the disconnect between the increasing number of healthcare IT educational opportunities being created by the government and vendors’ willingness (or unwillingness, as the case may be) to hire fresh grads. EJ Fechenda of HIMSS JobMine posed a question related to this conundrum better than I ever could have: “With federal deadlines looming, healthcare organizations need to get moving and there are a lot of job seekers out there ready for the challenge. Are there organizations or companies willing to extend opportunities to these candidates? Is there a training or job-shadowing program that can be used as a best practice for other organizations to implement? Who are the champions already doing this or willing to lead the charge?”

I may have found a champion in Rich Wicker, HIMS Director at Shore Memorial Hospital in New Jersey. Wicker is also an adjunct professor at two HITECH-affiliated community colleges, teaching students who already have strong backgrounds in healthcare or IT the basics of process, analysis, redesign, installation and ongoing maintenance to prepare them for second careers in physician office EMR implementations.

He certainly seems to have a passion for the subject. “I’m devoted to the EMR,” he told me during a recent phone interview. “That’s why I started teaching, really, because I want to see that [adoption] happen so badly.”

He tells me his students are guardedly optimistic about their future job opportunities, which he believes will surge this summer alongside an expected increase in physician adoption of EMRs – six months before the deadline to qualify for Meaningful Use incentives.

As we discussed the state of the HIT job market, we both wondered if what type of organization might have a greater role to play in ensuring that graduate from programs like Wicker’s find jobs.

“We had to really battle our way to get one [software] copy from one EMR vendor,” he explains. “I wish they were more amenable to providing educational software/packages like Apple does throughout all their PCs. I know a few different schools have joined with a vendor. One place I know of is showing Vista, another is showing eClinicalWorks, and another partnered with a local hospital that happens to use Sage.

“I have a relatively limited view, but from what I can see, the vendors are not really engaged with the HITECH student development program. I think they’d probably rather do it themselves.”

“Here’s an idea that I came up with,” he adds. “I’ll throw out the RECs (Regional Extension Centers). That’s another entity that’s funded – it’s kind of their job to get the docs to convert. If they could partner with the colleges and the graduates to possibly divert some of their funding to supplementing the graduates’ income while they worked at a physician practice … So the physician, let’s say, for $5 an hour, they could hire a qualified, certified person. These people are pretty good, too. They know what it is to work. They’ve probably worked 10 or 20 years already, either in IT or in healthcare. So they’re mature employees and highly motivated. They would be great to go in and do a 6-month installation. I think it would be great for the physician if, for $5 an hour, you get somebody that would probably cost you $30 an hour somewhere else.

“Let’s say the student can get another $10 an hour supplemented from the REC or somehow through the government. So they get $15 an hour to go in there … they get four or five months of experience doing an installation and then the physician can make a decision … maybe they ultimately hire the person. That’s just a crazy idea that I had that seemed like the pieces are out there that kind of potentially could work. I sent it into the ONC a couple of days ago.”

Could the RECs have a bigger role to play in ensuring that HITECH graduates gain on-the-job experience and employment? I’d love to hear from any readers out there who may work for or with RECs . Is Wicker’s idea doable? Have we found our champion?

I was recently asked by health IT vendor, NaviNet, if I’d be willing to do an interview as part of their “Expert Interview Series.” Since I’m always interested in pontificating about EMR and EHR, I consented. You can find the full interview here.

Here’s one answer I gave that I think really illustrates the key to broad EHR adoption:

You think that will really cause doctors to choose an EHR provider?
I do. I think doctors will talk to other doctors to get first-hand experiences since they’re very social within their own networks. They’ll want to be able to talk to other doctors, hear first-hand experiences. They’ll gravitate to vendors where other doctors say, “Yeah, this is much better for me over using paper.”

Key Message: Doctors Talk!

In the interview, I also suggested three challenges that practices will have in meeting the EHR Meaningful Use requirements:

• The provider didn’t understand the core measure.
• They thought the EHR vendor would do it.
• They thought it was satisfied through HIPAA or something else that they did.

Key Message: Be careful to understand meaningful use properly.

Lots more in the interview, so check out the NaviNet EMR Expert Interview Series for the rest of my answers.

I’ve had the good fortune in the past year or two to watch one of my daughters’ favorite babysitters blossom into a full-time nursing student at the University of West Georgia. Not only do my girls benefit from her great bedside manner, including an infinite amount of patience, but I get an occasional inside glimpse into the world of digital medical record keeping in the greater Atlanta area.

Her training at West Georgia has taken her to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta – Egleston, Wellstar Cobb and Austell, Fayette Piedmont, Tanner Medical Center and Gentiva Healthfield Hospice. She graciously offered to share her rookie’s perspective on the electronic medical records – including SCM/Quest (Allscripts Sunrise Clinical EHR system) and Meditech – she has used at several of the facilities she has trained in.

How long have your healthcare training facilities had EMRs in place?
All except Gentiva Healthfield Hospice – in-home hospice care, for the most part, sticks with paper charting. If they were to make the switch to an EMR, they would have to have access to a central database from their personal computers/iPads/Blackberries, etc. All others have had some sort of electronic database for at least five years.

How intuitive did you find them to be in your first training sessions/rounds?
Once I had been trained in the first system I encountered, the rest seemed very user-friendly. They have been in use long enough now that they are efficient and fairly self-explanatory.

They all allow an employee to cluster patient care and spend enough time with the patient because the time stamp on documentation can be changed to the time that the intervention was completed. For example, I could complete a full assessment on a patient, bathe them and administer their medications without having to document in the computer every few minutes. I could just open their EMR after completing their care and add the correct time stamp on my documentation.

What were the easiest to use, and what were the most difficult?
Meditech was the most difficult to use, perhaps because I had limited access as a student. It was difficult to find complete admission notes and patient histories.

Speaking from a “rookie’s” perspective, what would you tell vendors of these systems to better their products?
Add a patient verification requirement before each documentation session, i.e. each set of vital signs, medications given, etc. (Something simple, like a box with the patient’s name and DOB and an “Ok” button)

Did your supervisors express any enthusiasm or dissatisfaction with any particular systems?
All expressed enthusiasm, but they also were concerned any time a system was to be updated with even minor changes. Fayette Piedmont uses one EMR system for Labor and Delivery, and a completely different system for the rest of the hospital. This means, for the staff, that a new baby’s records have to be re-entered into a new system once they are discharged from labor and delivery and admitted to the NICU or postpartum unit. It also means the pharmacy has difficulty accessing vital information when, for instance, they need to know a baby’s weight to send the appropriate dose of medication to the NICU.

How aware are you of post-implementation training that goes on with EMRs, based on the facilities you’ve trained at? Do your supervisors ever mention it?
Once an employee is hired, they usually must display proficiency with the charting system within a specified training period. When Fayette Piedmont updated SCM/Quest, they did not retrain each employee, but they did send out a packet with a detailed description of the changes. From what I have seen, the older nurses who may have preferred paper charting at one point do not seem to have any problems with the electronic charting.

Have you been made aware of any increase/decrease in positive clinical outcomes as a result of physicians/nurses using these systems? Any examples you feel comfortable sharing?
The major changes to these systems each time they are updated usually involve the addition of safeguards. For example, the newest version of SCM/Quest has the patient’s name, weight, room number and allergies on every page of the charting system, and in multiple locations on the page.

For the employees who pay attention, this has reduced many documentation errors. There is also an embedded link to drug guides in every electronic medication order with explicit instructions and safe dose ranges. For the employee who knows these features are there, they are a tremendous help, and they do serve to protect the patient. It is still possible to document in the wrong patient’s chart, without realizing it, in any system.

Needless to say, it will be interesting to see how her experience with EMRs changes as she continues her studies and then moves into the professional world of nursing, which will likely coincide with healthcare facilities continuing to move through the various stages of Meaningful Use.

Stay tuned for next week’s post, in which I’ll profile an EMR educator, and find out what other students are facing when it comes to EMR training. In the meantime, what sort of healthcare IT-related challenges will our new workforce face in the coming year? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Dr. Sullivan is a practicing cardiologist who joined DrFirst in 2004, just after completing his term as President of the Massachusetts Medical Society. He is known throughout the healthcare industry as the father of the Continuity of Care Record (“CCR”) and a leader on the future of healthcare technology. He is assisting DrFirst in ensuring that Rcopia continues to add the functionality necessary to maintain its leadership position both in electronic prescribing and in the channel of communication between various sectors of the healthcare community and the physician. Dr. Sullivan is active in organized medical groups at the state and national level, and is both a delegate to the AMA and the Chairperson of their Council on Medical Service as well as past Co-Chair of the Physicians EHR Consortium.

The buzz surrounding Electronic Health Records (EHR) is nothing short of constant.  The daunting task of selection, purchase and implementation is quite confusing, technical, and expensive, with many physicians, clinics and health systems uncertain of their needs and questioning how the technology is going to impact the way they practice medicine and their bottom line. It’s all about workflow and productivity.

More recently, Providers are faced with the intimidating task of deciding which kind of system to install. There are all inclusive systems, often referred to as fully paperless or standard EHRs and there are so called a la carte systems known as modular EHRs.

The Case for Modular

Modular EHR systems allow providers to take a stepping stone approach to health IT clinical documentation and order writing, by choosing the tools and functions which make the most sense in their practices and clinics; improving specialized workflow and efficiency.  Going the modular route can gradually ease the provider and the office staff into a more paperless environment without having to make a full and often-times difficult transition to a fully paperless workspace.

There is need for caution however. The sheer volume of modules available can make selecting appropriate ones an overwhelming task.  Not only do clinicians need to be wary of which modules they are choosing, but also what functions have been certified by an authorized organization.

By combining specific modular systems, it can become “qualified,” making the user eligible for the monetary reimbursements set forth by Title IV of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

At DrFirst, our Rcopia-MU^TM has taken all of the guess work out of this process and is a completely certified Modular EHR that physicians can implement and start earning incentive money directly out-of-the-box.

The implementation of a complete EHR system can be confusing and time consuming.  Herein lays some distinct advantages of implementing a modular EHR.  Practices that have already implemented e-prescribing or registry modules may not need to relearn a different system, or move their data from one to another (as long as the current module is certified).

Providers who are considering going the modular route can check the certification status of their options at Certified Health IT Products List. The cost for a modular approach is often much less expensive and providers can select the modules from various vendors to meet their financial and practice-based needs.  Upon implementation, providers must show they’re using certified EHR technology in measureable ways to receive their incentive monies from the Federal Government.  With this very high ROI, many providers see the advantage of using the modular approach to postpone the decision process in selecting a complete EHR and yet at the same time earn Meaningful Use incentive money to put towards the cost of  the much more expensive system.

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, doctors who have not adopted an EHR (either modular or complete) by 2015 will be penalized by Medicare — a 1% penalty to begin, then up to 3% within three years. Many providers are banking on the reimbursement that has been made available by the ARRA to help offset the initial costs.

What is your practice considering, complete EHR or modular? Do you see benefits of one over the other?

Note:  The following is not to be taken at face value, exactly — I’m not literally convinced that it’s time for a revolution — but you might see a point or two here that are worth considering further.

Doctors, are you sick of having an EMR pushed down your throat by administrators and IT leaders that don’t care how disruptive or painful the change may be?  Do you feel like your complaints and concerns aren’t being heard?  Are you actually afraid a patient will be hurt someday because of the EMR’s limitations?

Well, I say it’s high time you get radical and OccupyYourEMR!  Get in there and resist until your (absolutely critical) voice is being heard.

If you don’t, you know you’re going to be steamrolled into using a platform that’s awkward, ugly, inflexible and slow — in short, a system only the IT admin and hospital board who funded it could love.   Maybe you’re not ready to stop working, but what if you refused to log in?

As things stand, you have little to gain and a lot to lose by blindly kowtowing to EMR adoption demands.

Hey, if Hospital X installs an EHR and it seems to work, the CIO and the CEO and the board of directors look like geniuses. Some of them will probably get big bonuses if everything falls into place just right.

You, on the other hand, will be lucky if the new system doesn’t cut your work pace in half, confuse you and make charting a painful chore. Oh, and if things really go badly, you’ll harm or kill a patient because you didn’t read the EMR right.  Of course, the hospital will be right there beside you offering the best legal defense money can buy, right? (Uh, not really…)

Yes, there are some stories out there about EMRs that actually improve patient care and make doctors’ lives easier, but let’s face it, there’s a reason we don’t publish a ton of those here (or on sister blog Hospital EMR and EHR).  I’m not suggesting that all EMR rollouts are a mess, but few are a walk in the garden either. And it’s more common than you might think for a provider organization to go through a second or even a third installation before everything works.

Hey, don’t misunderstand me, I still believe EMRs are going to be a positive force over the long term.  In the mean time, though, some clinicians will be casualties — either becoming burned out by new work expectations, hating the new process or even making dangerous mistakes. Don’t be one of them.

Demand an EHR that helps your workflow, helps you provide better patient care, makes your life better, and lives up to the expectations the EMR salesperson made. An EHR that does those things will be welcomed by almost all doctors and other staff.

There’s a lot of talk in the healthcare industry right now about bringing health management tools to the consumer. Whether it’s apps for your iPhone or iPad, games to play on your Wii, or free-standing health-and-wellness kiosks at your local pharmacy, digital applications seem to the delivery method of choice right now. I think those of us in the healthcare IT industry sometimes take for granted that not everybody in the US has a smartphone, computer or even Internet access, which to me always begs the question: How great are these bright and shiny health apps if the populations that need them most don’t have access to them? And aren’t Meaningful Use and Accountable Care incentives/payments targeted towards government-sponsored healthcare recipients? The most likely patient population to NOT have reliable access to the Internet?

It’s this concept of a digital divide in healthcare that I am starting to believe will truly bend the curve when it comes to absolute interoperability – the secure sharing of information between patient, provider, payer, vendor, government, etc., anytime, anywhere. Only those patients who have access to these digital healthcare technologies will begin to clamor for them at their next doctors’ visits. Only patients’ whose doctors in turn have reached out to them via email, text or social media regarding the switch to electronic medical records, development of health information exchange and the benefits to care these will hopefully bring will be ready and willing to go with the digital flow.

I was intrigued by a recent news story on NPR the other morning that detailed a recently unveiled government plan – the Connect to Compete Initiative – to offer cheaper broadband access and computers to low-income families. The story pointed out that “about one-third of Americans – that would be 100 million people, give or take – do not have Internet access in their homes.” (I’d be interested to know how many of that population are on Medicare or Medicaid, or have no insurance at all.) Participating companies will offer broadband service to eligible families for $10 a month, while others will offer computers for as little as $150.

Further investigating into the story dug up a more detailed report from Reuters, which explained that eligible families will be those who have at least one child enrolled in the National School Lunch Program. According to a recent Commerce Department report on U.S. broadband adoption, only 43 percent of households with annual incomes below $25,000 had broadband access at home, while 93 percent of households with incomes exceeding $100,000 had broadband.

I think this is a step in the right direction, and am pleasantly surprised that it’s being enacted by the government – who got this digital healthcare ball rolling downhill fast in the first place.

As more and more low-income/average/middle-class Americans – or whatever we want to call ourselves – begin to speak out about the systemic inequalities we experience in this country’s financial, healthcare and educational systems, it’s nice to think (naively perhaps) that somebody just might be listening. As we see an increase in adoption of digital technologies in the consumer space, so too do I think we’ll see a correlating increase in adoption of healthcare IT by the providers that care for them.