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.
With the mandate of electronic health records (EHR) across the nation, hospitals and physicians are researching, evaluating and purchasing EHR Systems. These systems range in price from affordable with minimal investment to the Rolls Royce version.
Many hospitals are investing large capital dollars for EHR programs. Hospitals must choose a vendor that will meet the organization’s needs. Physicians may choose systems that are more narrowly focussed to the needs of their offices and their specialization. In other words, interoperability may be addressed for hospital EHR systems with their more diverse internal users and may not be a major consideration for a non-network physician. Even with anEHR system in place, they do not necessarily make information sharing easier since many of them do not have interoperability outside of their networks.
Guest post by William Daniel, M.D., medical director of Quality at Mid-America Heart Institute, Kansas City, and Chief Medical Officer for Emerge CDS.
With the new wave of healthcare reform upon us, hospitals are seeking ways to meet requirements of . With a growing number of hospitals incorporating electronic health records, health IT tools are becoming more prevalent. In fact in August 2012, a second stage of meaningful use guidelines for EHRs was set requiring physicians to use some form of clinical decision support in their practice.
The purpose of clinical decision software (CDS) software is to help the doctor?patient work process run more smoothly, however, often times, hospital staffs complain about technologies adding more time and money to the work flow. In a CompTIA’s study, 56 percent of respondents noted a need to make health IT tools easier to use, improve interoperability and increase operating speed.
Guest post by Fauzia Khan, MD, FCAP, is chief medical officer and co-founder of Alere Analytics.
This has been a very interesting year for the healthcare industry, which appears to be on the brink of a real sea change. Government mandates are driving transformative discussions in the C-suite circles on topics such as meeting meaningful use Stage 2 and Stage 3 requirements, satisfying Accountable Care Organization (ACO) standards, care delivery models in the patient-centered medical home and much, much more.
The thriving provider based healthcare IT industry is no longer news. The history and evolution of the American healthcare system is unique. In 2009, Congress agreed that better information technology was needed and approved a $20B stimulus under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The technology being deployed is expected to result in better patient outcomes. Medicare/Medicaid “carrots” and “sticks” were tied to “Meaningful Use (MU)” criteria. We are now in Stage 2 and it is not getting any easier.
However, that stimulus is being consumed and time is running out. But, providers have spent far more than $20B and they are running out of margin and time. The provider sector remains a highly fragmented delivery system of primary, acute and post-acute caregivers. This sector is mostly nonprofit and historically local and/or regional in nature.
In my engagement with leaders in and around health IT, I’m fortunate to have access to some of the best thinking and leadership in the industry. Part of my responsibility of with this publication is to collate and collect some of what I consider to be the best thought leadership in health IT and publish it for anyone to read.
In my “travels,” I recently was introduced to Dr. Ed Fotsch, CEO of PDR Network, an organization that provides innovative products and services that benefit bio/pharmaceutical manufacturers, electronic health record (EHR) and ePrescribing vendors. Hopefully, I’ll be able to feature him in the near future in a HIT Thought Leadership Highlight.
A fascinating recent report from the HealthLeaders about the supposed scads of errors being associated with HIT, as health systems transition to the age of electronic records. According to the report that features the results of a recent study by ECRI Institute’s Patient Safety Organization, some of the errors “are causing harm and in so many serious ways, providers are only now beginning to understand the scope.”
For example, during the 2012 study at 36 participating hospitals, computer programs truncated dosage fields leading to morphine-caused respiratory arrest; lab test and transplant surgery records sometimes didn’t talk to each other, leading to organ rejection and patient death; and an electronic systems’ misinterpretation of the time “midnight” meant an infant received antibiotics one dangerous day too late.
