Sunday, August 12, 2012

EHR Progress?

The EHR systems are still provider centric. Frankly this is one of the biggest mistakes ever. They require providers to transfer data, often in an unusable manner. Now we are seeing the 3rd generation coming.

As HealthCare states:


For Stage 3, the Health IT Policy Committee's Meaningful Use Workgroup wants physicians and hospitals to increase their use of clinical decision support; computerized physician order entry (CPOE); structured, machine-readable data; and medication reconciliation (the process of comparing a patient's medication orders to all the meds he or she has actually been taking). The plan also ramps up requirements for patient engagement. 

In a plan recently unveiled in Washington, D.C., the workgroup made its preliminary recommendations for Stage 3. 

New for Stage 3 would be requiring providers to enable at least 10% of their patients to submit their medical history electronically, to accept readings from home medical devices, and to update and correct information in EHRs. Providers also would need to supply electronic care plans to other providers and care sites when patients are referred or moved, and the referring site would be required to send a small percentage of results back, 


One need just look at what is proposed and the workload is increasing exponentially. Patient Care plans are like Grammar School Class Teacher Plans, they will become some off the shelf piece of pdf and that is NOT the way medicine is practiced. This appears to be a techy's dream of how complex to make something. What will this do to the practice of medicine. Already many physicians have hired another person to enter and keep the EHR, and many physicians may never look at or even know how to examine an EHR.

In addition the need to integrate with billing and authorization is totally lacking. The data is not patient centric and it fails to adequately deal with displaying data for chronic disease management. This is a total nightmare and will just explode the costs of health care with no positive benefit.