Law Students

EMR Pain is Real!

Obama and Congressional Leaders Can?t Overlook EMR Failure Rates | EMR and HIPAA. This post raises some not only interesting, but ultimately quite useful, points regarding the level of resistance that might be encountered as the nation attempts to move to electronic records.

As the post suggests, failures en masse cannot be ignored without the risk of a backlash that could prove debilitating, or worse. There will be resistance to almost any change. The history of the IT industry itself is a history of resistance: from mainframes to client server and from client server to the cloud.

However, the mass resistance to forced change, as may soon be prevalent in the healthcare industry, may be unprecedented. Yes the industry is in desperate need of innovation and computerized, shareable electronic records, but mere cheer leading and new laws will not be nearly enough to achieve the objective.

Providers will need real incentives, and lots of help, in making the kinds of painful changes that need to be made. The real incentive are likely to come by changing compensation schemes in order to create a truly competitive industry. The "lots of help" aspect will require a creative multi-disciplinary approach in order for the industry as a whole is to avoid the many traps and pitfalls that await unsuspecting practices.

It really doesn't matter if often (or usually) the practices themselves are to blame, the system as a whole simply cannot tolerate mass failure. The Obama administration simply cannot afford to ignore this challenge.

Full post as published by LawTechTV on January 29, 2009 (boomark / email).