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.

As most of you know, John Halamka is publishing content everywhere. In fact, maybe I should see if he’ll publish some here. Halamka is really smart and respected by many for good reason. So, I was intrigued to find an article in the Technology Review (an MIT publication) where Halamka higlights what he considers the major EHR and healthcare IT developments over the next five years.

I’ve been doing a number of series lately on EMR and EHR & EMR and HIPAA and since people seem to really like them, I decided I’d make Halamka’s major EHR developments into a series as well.

The first Major EHR Development is: EHR In the Cloud

In the article above, Halamka offers some interesting comments about doctors being doctors and not tech people, the issues of privacy in the cloud and hospitals leaning towards “private clouds.” Let’s take a look at each of these.

Doctors Don’t Want to be Tech People
While there are certainly exceptions to the rule, it’s true that most doctors just want their tech to work. They don’t want to spend a weekend installing a server. There’s little argument that a SaaS EHR requires less in office tech. This fact will end up being a major driving force behind the adoption of SaaS EHR software over the client server counterparts.

Certainly, many doctors will still feel comfortable with their local IT help doing the work for a client server install. Also, many still feel more comfortable having their EHR data stored on a server in their office. This issue will continue to fester for a long time to come. At least until the SaaS EHR vendors provide doctors a copy of their data which they can store in their office. Plus, SaaS EHR are much faster today than they were, but there’s still a few things that a client server can do that is just flat out faster than client server.

I still see the ease of implementation and “less tech” helping SaaS EHR software to continue to gain market share.

Privacy in the Cloud
The biggest problem here is likely that doctors aren’t technical enough to really understand the risks of data in the cloud or not. Plus, I think you can reasonably make an argument that both sides have privacy risks. Most people are becoming much more comfortable with data stored in the cloud. I expect this trend to continue.

Private Clouds for Hospitals
Halamka claims that he, “estimates that moving infrastructure and applications to my hospital’s private cloud has reduced the cost of implementing electronic health records by half.” Of course, we have a lot of possible definitions of “cloud” and I’m not exactly sure how Halamka defines his private cloud. However, anyone who’s managed client installs of EHR software, including client upgrades, etc knows some of the pains associated with it. I’d be interested to know what other savings Halamka and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center get from their “private cloud.”

Cloud and EHR
There’s one thing I can’t ever get out of me head when I think about EHR and the cloud. Someone once told me (sorry I can’t remember who), “The cloud has always won in every industry. It will win in EHR too.” I hate when people use terms like always and every, but I haven’t (yet?) found an example to prove that person wrong.

Last month, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) became the first hospital to to have its EHR certified as “complete” by the CCHIT.

BIDMC was part of a pilot program testing out CCHIT’s EHR Alternative Certification for Hospitals (EACH), a special program for installed hospital EHR technology.

How did the testing process go?  Well, according to Beth Israel CIO John Halamka, the CCHIT staff was very helpful, but the NIST scripts could use some work before CCHIT rolls out EACH to the world.

BIDMC, which runs all-Intersystems Cache-based hospital systems and Microsoft SQL Server-based business intelligence systems,  had to follow 500 pages of  NIST scripts over 8 hours to satisfy the examiners.

While many of those scripts made sense to Halamka, some seemed just plain odd.   For example, he notes, NIST scripts require hospitals to place a CPOE order for Darvocet for pain control, even though Darvocet has been removed from the market by the FDA.    In another case, a script required Beth Israel to send data to a public health entity about an infection the patient did not have, he says.

All told, if your hospital is planning to try for EACH certification, you’d better be well prepared, Halamka suggests.  ”I recommend that hospitals devote at least 2 weeks and 5 FTEs to reviewing the scripts, analyzing the best way to show the necessary functionality, and practicing the demonstration,”  Halamka warns readers of his Life as a Healthcare CIO blog.

Here’s the story from the American Medical News:

The Mayo Clinic announced the launch of a new personal health record system that will be available to anyone, including those who are not Mayo patients. Those involved with the project say the system, powered by Microsoft HealthVault, could also carry benefits for non-Mayo physicians.

Is it just me, or is my headline (which is theirs also) really misleading? When I saw the headline I was really interested to see the type of PHR that Mayo Clinic had created. Instead, all they’re doing is adopting Microsoft HealthVault. That’s a big win for Microsoft HealthVault, but that’s been publicly available for a while. I’m not sure why Mayo Clinic joining HealthVault makes it any more available to those outside of Mayo.

The more interesting part of the article is when they talk about Mayo Clinic moving forward despite Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston stopping claims data from being sent to Google Health:

The launch of Mayo’s system came days after Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston announced it would stop sending claims data to patients’ Google Health accounts due to the possibility that the data contain errors. The move reignited the debate over whether PHRs can contain too much data that is not useful to physicians, or dangerous for them to rely on.

Mayo’s system will allow the import of claims data through Health Vault, but Mayo’s physicians will likely not use it, the organization said. Other patients and their physicians can choose whether the information is relevant enough to be kept.

I’d still like to see better support for PHR in various EMR and EHR products. However, until there’s a good standard I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.