Sporting a subtitle like “Thought leadership in eye care EHRs” when I haven’t said anything yet about EHRs, it seems time to put my cards on the table.
We’ve already seen a good few software vendors drop out of the race. The most obvious tell is those who just didn’t go for certification. They could see the bar rising and knew, for one reason or another, it was time to call it a day. That’s okay. They may prove to be the wise ones!
There are other groups too: let’s call them the turtles and the hares. The hares are those that raced to certification and got there first, for the most part the big-name players. That’s okay too. Several of these frontrunners were also the first to get the big surprise … that meaningful use had little to do with usability. One is for the feds and payers, the other is for you. Two audiences, two sets of criteria.
Then there are the turtles … you know, slow and steady wins the race? We turtles got the surprise too. It may have been slightly less rude. Even if you saw it coming, it still played out in the trenches with real users pushing back saying, “I don’t care if you’re certified, this isn’t working for me!” We’re all out of our comfort zone and it’s likely to stay that way for a while.
There’s a hidden reality about this transition to EHRs. The obvious part is that we’re moving from paper to computers. What’s less obvious is that, even were we staying with paper, the rules would still be changing. The feds and payers are more in love with information than with technology. It’s just that Health IT is the means to the end. To control costs in healthcare, it takes more information, a lot more. As much as we feel unprepared for a higher level of documentation in EHRs, we’d be even less able to do it on paper. Imagine calculating those numerators and denominators on the back of your paper chart!
To be continued …
Alistair Jackson, M.Ed.
No comments:
Post a Comment