Comments on: EMRs and your life http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2008/09/emrs-and-your-life.html Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:46:00 +0000 hourly 1 By: Edmund Billings MDhttp://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2008/09/emrs-and-your-life.html#comment-87460 Edmund Billings MD Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:10:00 +0000 http://clients.emmense.com/kevinmd/2008/09/emrs-and-your-life.html#comment-87460 We totally agree it takes time for adoption and to get to a critical mass of patients in the system to realize the benefits. The pain, on the other hand, is often due the the proprietary nature of the design of the products and the feature function wars that are the nature of antiquated proprietary business model. They compete on how pretty their screens are and bells and whistles, not on simplicity and time to value.<br/><br/>Dr. L. Gordon Moore recently warned colleagues at the 2008 Scientific Assembly of the American Academy of Family Physicians to watch out for “monolithic and expensive” IT vendors, who have not given practitioners the right tools to better care for patients. He even likened the vendors to Pozni schemers. Unfortunately, Dr. Moore’s descriptions ring too true for practitioners. The healthcare industry has muddled through taxing, electronic health systems that really only work for IT vendors to make money. That is why we support Rep. Pete Stark’s recent proposal, which establishes federal standards and deadlines for a national, interoperable electronic health records (EHRs) network and promotes open source healthcare IT. VistA is used across the entire VA health system and 65% of physicians trained over the past decade have used it. OpenVista, the commercialized version of VistA, is now in use in dozens of facilities. OpenVista participants share information and are empowered to drive the innovation themselves. There’s no game playing here. We totally agree it takes time for adoption and to get to a critical mass of patients in the system to realize the benefits. The pain, on the other hand, is often due the the proprietary nature of the design of the products and the feature function wars that are the nature of antiquated proprietary business model. They compete on how pretty their screens are and bells and whistles, not on simplicity and time to value.

Dr. L. Gordon Moore recently warned colleagues at the 2008 Scientific Assembly of the American Academy of Family Physicians to watch out for “monolithic and expensive” IT vendors, who have not given practitioners the right tools to better care for patients. He even likened the vendors to Pozni schemers. Unfortunately, Dr. Moore’s descriptions ring too true for practitioners. The healthcare industry has muddled through taxing, electronic health systems that really only work for IT vendors to make money. That is why we support Rep. Pete Stark’s recent proposal, which establishes federal standards and deadlines for a national, interoperable electronic health records (EHRs) network and promotes open source healthcare IT. VistA is used across the entire VA health system and 65% of physicians trained over the past decade have used it. OpenVista, the commercialized version of VistA, is now in use in dozens of facilities. OpenVista participants share information and are empowered to drive the innovation themselves. There’s no game playing here.

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