Guest post by Sean Armstrong, Director of Product Management at AppNeta.
Today, healthcare practices run on critical applications that connect remote users (hospitals, physicians, clinics) to centralized and hosted resources. From the largest medical centers to small clinics, healthcare organizations depend on network-sensitive applications every day. Electronic Health Records (EHR), ePrescriptions, medical imaging, online medical registries, desktop virtualization, VoIP, IP storage, cloud–based system, Software-as-a-Service — all of these critical applications help keep hospitals, physicians and clinics running. When these slow down or crash, so do the healthcare providers and the offices relying on them.
Here are five main reasons why every healthcare provider needs be able to monitor and manage application and network performance:
Electronic health record prices and contract terms remain ever elusive, and in some case, divisive. Certainly, with more than 50 percent of all practice-based physicians using an electronic health record, there is still little clarity and open communication as to the pricing and contract structure of the very systems that physicians and their practices are mandated to build their practices on.
Having worked for an electronic health record vendor, I understand the need for discreetness to a point, as well as the fact that prices of products and terms of contacts can’t always be posted to the web or nailed to the door like an a la carte menu; however, I do believe that the process should be a bit more transparent than it currently is.
That said, I’ve asked a couple industry leaders some of the questions I’ve had on the subject and their responses are educational, insightful and informative. I hope you feel the same.
I can’t think of a more obvious statement than the one recently made by Impact Advisor principal Laura Kreofsky, who said recently that everyone in healthcare is going to hit a wall in a year or two and fatigue is going to settle in regarding meaningful use.
By 2015, we’re all going to be sick and tired of meaningful use.
Because I’m fascinated with the lack of information surrounding pricing of various electronic health records and because I admire the work of AmericanEHR Partners, I thought it relevant to shine a little light on another interesting piece of information from the organization.
As this seems to be the year of the big EHR switch, and because seemingly the folks at AmericanEHR hear as much as I do about the lack of transparency in the pricing structure of these solutions, I thought I’d publish some guidance for what to consider when making the transition to EHRs. In my research on the subject – I’m developing a piece on the subject of EHR pricing – I came across this piece, compiled by the AmericanEHR from the Maryland Health Care Commission.
Breaking news hits the wires from the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), which has responded to a recent query by a group of six Republican senators who are hell bent on slowing down the meaningful use program to ensure its operating efficiently and not just handing out money to everyone claiming they’ve met Stage 1 (and eventually the other stages).
What’s remarkable about the news, though, is that CHIME actually issues a letter calling for a one-year extension of meaningful use Stage 2. According to CHIME’s letter, as reported by Healthcare Informatics,
For several years, the market and its insiders have pontificated about when the vendor landscape is going to suddenly change and contract. With countless hundreds of EHR vendors in the space in some capacity, the annual trade publication trend pieces that run in December and January often predict the year we’re about the enter as the year in which the market with change and a great many vendors will disappear.
Last year this was the case. This year is no different. Next year will be the same.
In his July 2012 piece, “Why the EHR market is on the brink of mass consolidation,” Dr. Robert Rowley writes in Government Health IT that given that 70 percent of users on the top 12 systems out of about 600 that these market forces will lead to consolidation.
When I worked with Sage Healthcare, one of the tenants of our marketing campaign was ensuring the market and those we served were well aware of the length of time our product had been used in ambulatory practice and its worth to countless physicians during that time.
Thirty years is a long time, especially for the ever changing world of software and technology; perhaps too long.
But I digress. Certainly, a product with three decades of service deserves to be recognized as one of the market’s leaders. After all, it is in the Smithsonian as the first practice management system in use commercially.
