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Federal Deadline Hobbling eHealth IT Rollout
Lucas123 writes "A federal deadline that begins next year and requires hospitals to prove they're meaningfully using electronic health records will lead to technical problems and data errors affecting patient care, say politicians and top IT professionals responsible for the deployments. Physicians and hospitals have until the end of 2011 to receive the maximum federal incentive monies to deploy the technology. If not deployed by 2015, they face penalties through cuts in Medicare reimbursements. 'I think we have nontechnology people making decisions about technology,' said Gregg Veltri, CIO at Denver Health. 'I wonder if anybody understands the reality of IT systems and how complex they are, especially when they're integrated together. You're going to sacrifice quality if you increase the speed [of the rollout].'"
That's the biggest problem I've seen.
There's no real e-standard for e-medical records.
This is mainly from friends with knowledge of Meditech and Epic, some of them from HIMSS level 6 institutions (it only goes to 7).
The systems might be able to talk to others of the same type (maybe, sometimes they don't), but so far, there's no real "medical record standard" that everyone can read.
Another added problem is actually DOING the e-record...
History, documentation, orders, verifying meds,,,
I've heard of widely varying times for these activities, anywhere from 20 to 60 min. on a new patient, all usually done by the RN on duty, typing away instead of actually attending to the patient directly.
Speed of completion is usually in relation of the RN's language skills relative to the patient (native english speaking RNs are usually the fastest, bi-lingual eng/spanish are almost always the exact same speed).
After reading the posts here I felt compelled to respond to several points raised:
1. "Great software developers entering the field today aspire to work on pop culture technology like Facebook, Google, and CG animated film production. Who does that leave to work on hospital IT? Does hospital IT pay well enough to compete with the sexy IT jobs?"
Yes. It pays quite well and with federal dollars flowing there is a HUGE push to implement and integrate EMR technology. There are development gigs that pay more, but not a lot more (in either number of open positions or dollars).
2. "Non technology people dictating the technology sector. Obama does not have an ounce of knowledge about health care systems, yet thinks he knows everything that should be done. It's a farce."
True - Obama doesn't know about health care systems - Nor does he need to. "He" is not dictating the "how" just the "what". That seems appropriate for the Federal Government. In terms of actual Federal input - it's pretty minimal - maybe even more minimal than desired. They are certainly driving the industry in a good way (towards integrated health records) - but have not even specified format or protocol - much less the "single repository" that so many are afraid of. The private sector - rightly or wrongly - has standardized on HL7 (v2 mostly from what I've seen - too bad really - v3 is XML while v2 is a bit arcane - pipe ("|") and carat ("^") delimited).
3. Deadline : Plain and simple, without a deadline the industry would easily take another 20 years to get fully automated.
4. "I bet this is another case of the leftovers crying about investing money in infrastructure that will save them money in the long run but they see it as an expense and fight it."
Because of the stimulus package no one is fighting it. On the contrary - any given EMR is now reporting a six month backlog to integrate.