You make excellent and valid points. Your last post pretty much details what needs to happen. My problem now, as a physician, is that there is no one in power who is thinking like you are. Without good central communication, implementation of the EMR is turning out to be like VHS vs Betamax, Blu-Ray, etc.. This is a project that is too important to let it develop itself by “shaking out” the smaller players. The way it is working now, most doctors are seeing only 60%-80% of the patients that they saw the “old” way. If we want to cut the cost of healthcare, those numbers need to be 120%-140% with the EMR compared to “before the EMR”. Also, right now, most EMRs make setting up an Exchange server look like setting up Outlook Express.
I’m not really sure who’s running the show for overall design of the EMR. It clearly isn’t an IT type with any power. I suspect our office with five physicians will spend half a million implementing the EMR, and we’ll end up “redoing” a lot of stuff because we basically are having an alpha release pushed on us billed as an SP2 version. You know where that goes! The provisions of the stimulus package got a lot of doctors, me included, to jump into the EMR, and it came as a compete surprise to the vendors, who were not tooled up to implement a lot of complex installations at once (How could they be?) Like a lot of software, you have to use it for a while before you realize what its shortcomings are.
Rest assured, there are lots of IT jobs available here because the typical physician doesn’t have a prayer of implementing the EMR without large quantities of IT help.
