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Federal Deadline Hobbling eHealth IT Rollout

Posted by Soulskill on from the you-can't-hold-servers-together-with-red-tape dept.

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].'"

2 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. EMR Integration and Developer Pay by ChronoFish · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:EMR Integration and Developer Pay by bigpaperbag · · Score: 3, Informative

      Working in Healthcare IT and actually on an EMR project for a fairly prominent hospital I'd like to comment on a few of your points:

      1) There is HUGE need for developers but budget concerns are a real problem, the stimulus money is years away but the cost of implementation is immediate. This creates a real problem, the need is there but the budget isn't and the timeframe for implementation doesn't leave much room to adjust the budget to open new positions without cutting into development time.

      2) I'm going to stay out of the pro/anti-Obama sentiment but I will agree that the government is being way too minimal. If they want to set the rules, they need to set the rules. Currently the vague nature of "meaningful use" is a major problem when trying to tie together multiple legacy systems in time. Obviously it would be nice to eventually merge everything into one flow, we simply don't have time for that, and no one can afford to miss the deadlines. Also, Google and MS are both making extreme pushes for their "single repository" systems. The very concept disturbs me even as I implement it.

      3) Yes deadlines are good for driving the industry forward, but there are realistic problems with the deadlines that have been set. If you told every person in america that they had to switch to a hybrid car or half their pay would be garnished you would end up with a lot of people walking to work. Which ties directly into 4) the third party companies are backed up, the hospitals are trying to pick up the slack but are backed up by point 1 and everyone is just sort of holding their breath.