Comments on: Its Not About Meaningful Use

By: AMA Aims to Deter Purchasing of Failure-Prone EMRs « health care commentaries from around the world

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:44:07 +0000

[...] Finally, major physician organizations are relaying to the government their members’ concerns about the significant underlying problems and failures associated with traditional EMRs—the very type of EMR that the government is encouraging physicians to adopt. The letter supports the analysis I presented in my post, “Government EMR: Teetering on the Backs of Physicians,” in which I maintained that the meaningful use requirements just compound fundamental product problems. It also comes on the heels of the recent Milbank Quarterly study, as well as the new MGMA study revealing productivity loss (discussed in last week’s EMR Straight Talk), and a growing body of comments in the media about the negative impact that traditional EMRs have on productivity, (e.g., John Moore’s Chilmark Research story, “It’s Not About Meaningful Use.”) [...]

By: Gerry Higgins

Gerry Higgins — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:29:22 +0000

I don’t think that small physician practices are the best settings for implementation of an EHR. The financial incentives do not outweigh the cost to transition from a paper-based system. However, I do think that other applications such as E-Prescribing are of great benefit to a small practice setting. In the final analysis, it is all going to become electronic, maybe dominated by a few large IT company products.

From a ‘Green Mountain’ boy – Gerry Higgins

By: John

John — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:48:36 +0000

Yes Beth, there are some lessons to be learned here and I am in the process of delving deeper into the implementation and roll-out of this particular EHR to get to the bottom of this deployment. What I do know…
1) The user interface is a nightmare for clinicians – little attention paid to workflow, far too many clicks to accomplish event the simplest of tasks.
2) Recent upgrade caused a system wide failure and an inability for this particular clinic to access notes which made for some very awkward visits with patients when clinicians could not recall by memory what happened at last visit. The work-around was eventually having the larger host clinic of software print out the notes, fax them to this smaller clinic where clinicians (ie nurses) re-entered the data.
3) This small clinic (3 docs, 5 nurses, 2 admin) may have been better off with a simpler EHR more appropriate to the size of clinic than the one instaled, who’s sweet spot is in the 50 docs and more practices.

By: Beth

Beth — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:38:20 +0000

I’m sure there are many people who be interested in “what went wrong” with this implementation so others can learn from the mistakes. Any chance of providing a list of the major causes of issues (i.e., was inadequate business process analysis a part of the problem?)?

By: ICMCC News Page » Its Not About Meaningful Use

ICMCC News Page » Its Not About Meaningful Use — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:09:17 +0000

[...] Article John Moore, Chilmark Research, 10 March 2010 SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Its Not About Meaningful Use", url: "http://articles.icmcc.org/2010/03/11/its-not-about-meaningful-use/" }); [...]