At the same meeting where Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, commented about healthcare IT, there was another interesting comment by Eric Lander about the state of researching EMR and healthcare IT. Here’s his comment:

“My sense is that we don’t respect this stuff,” said PCAST co-chair Eric Lander. “We respect the cancer genome, but not checklists. What do we need to do to send a signal to the next generation of researchers that this is a high-class, worthy thing to do? What would it take to move the needle?”

I agree. I’ve done the searching through the journals for well done EMR research and found very little. Not that research is the end all be all, but it can provide insight that can’t be found other ways.