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EHRs: is it easier to pay the penalty than meet the requirements?

by Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | February 09, 2016
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Multi-Disciplinary Team software
From the January/February 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

The electronic health record (EHR) market is becoming one of the biggest revenue-generating segments in health care, according to a Healthcare Data Solutions report. At last year’s Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference, Accenture estimated that the EHR market was worth $23 billion by the end of 2015. But as the market expands, it also may become more competitive since providers now have a choice of over 400 EHR vendors. A KLAS survey found that 27 percent of medical practices are planning to replace their EHR system and 12 percent want to, but are unable to because of financial constraints.

The small and mid-sized EHR vendors are expected to be pushed out of the market and the major vendors will dominate. But as the providers’ needs broaden, the vendors will have to offer advanced capabilities or risk fizzling out of the market. Many of the challenges that providers face today are related to the poor usability of EHRs and the cumbersome requirements of the Meaningful Use program. Fortunately, organizations like the American Medical Association (AMA) are trying to bring about change, and the vendors seem to be on board.

Connecting all the parts
“The problem that we are having now is that the consumer is seeing how well things are being integrated, such as your smart TVs having apps on them, and they want to know why they can’t do that in health care,” says Matt Adams, health care information technology analyst at MD Buyline. When a nurse in a doctor’s office asks the patient a question, they want to know why the other nurse at the hospital or other specialty clinic has to ask the same questions. Unfortunately, part of the problem is the EHRs that vendors have designed. According to HIMSS, interoperability describes the extent to which systems and devices can exchange data and interpret that shared data.

“Interoperability is a big thing that vendors have been standing in the way of because some of them have invested billions of dollars to create a homegrown technology,” says Adams. “That is their most efficient technology and it’s not made to be efficient with other vendors’ technology.”

In late December, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology released its standards and implementation specification to encourage interoperability between EHR systems. The ONC realizes that since the vendors have invested billions of dollars into their EHRs, it’s going to take billions of dollars of incentives to make the systems more “open code."

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