"EMR Adoption before Infrastructure" - Why Electronic Medical Records Adoption by Medical Practices must precede the "Super Highway of Health Information Exchange".

The United States Health Care Industry is currently in great disarray. Many unanswered questions from Health Care Reform to American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) and Stimulus dollars will soon to be available. This will trigger rapid adoption of EMR by practicing physicians in the US.

Many of the worlds largest companies like, Google, Microsoft, Intel & IBM, to name a few, are focused on the infrastructure of EMR interoperability. Standards are being written and re-written for enabling interoperability and information exchange between healthcare applications like EMR, Practice management systems and labs. This is a great plan, however: Adoption of EMR must precede this “Super Highway/ Infrastructure”. EMR is the single largest application which will provide majority of healthcare information traffic on this super highway. A super highway with no traffic is of no value. Traffic of information is the key. The key is the EMR.

This is why the adoption of EMR must take place at the point of care before the industry can be linked for information exchange.

Today in the EMR industry, so few practices are on an EMR that the “Super Highway of Health Exchange” cannot even take shape or show value until this critical mass has been established. Once the adoption rate increases, the “Ports” will find a way to be opened for cross communication between different systems. Many practices are holding off on a decision to move to EMR for a variety of reasons. One that seems to appear often is the thought of Interoperability concerns between Physicians and their respected admitting privileged hospitals. As practicing physicians, investing in the right EMR is paramount to the continued success of a paperless medical practice.

So how do you push practices to adopt EMR? Ask right questions to safeguard against interoperability issues. A recommendation to considering an EMR is to ask if the product is HL7 compliant. www.hl7.org This widely recognized platform will allow different systems to communicate with one another. CCR and CCD standards are now available for interoperability. The concern of interoperability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoperability should be minimized, or dismissed entirely.

How do we in the healthcare industry know when to act and which way to go? As a physician with over 30 years of experience in private practice and sitting as the Chief Medical Officer at a hospital in San Diego, Robert Brunst, MD of San Diego, CA. & www.innervisionhealth.com has discussed his reasons to proceed with his EMR conversion now:

"I chose to buy an EMR now, to allow for time to implement and have my staff properly trained, so I can take full advantage of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act stimulus Dollars. I want my staff fully trained and implemented to be able to demonstrate "Meaningful Use of my EMR" by January 1, 2011. I understand that time to convert to EMR and become proficient and  be able to demonstrate this "meaningful use" may take my practice a few months. So I acted now, to ensure my opportunity to realize the full cash benefit”.

Some items to ensure prior to this EMR investment include: vendors’ compliance with Continuing Care Records (CCR), Continuing Care Documentation (CCD), Software compatibility for bilateral interfaces with laboratories and imaging centers. This will insure your EMR selection is capable of migrating data to take advantage to the ARRA stimulus dollars by demonstrating “Meaningful use”.

The healthcare industry will see inevitable tremendous growth in the next couple of years; perhaps even beyond the ability to deliver as rapidly as doctors might want. 

The message: ACT NOW. Delaying this decision much longer could cost your practice thousands of dollars in lost revenue. This loss will come by a couple of ways: inadequate training by the vendor to “hurry things along”, a back log of clients in need of assistance, reduced patient load as a direct result of the preceding factors.

Copy write: 2009 Bizmatics, inc. Producers of PrognoCIS EMR.

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