On Twitter, there’s a new hashtag: #EHRbacklash No, this Editor did not invent it (it would have been #EHRmisery), but after writing about it since November, it seems like the zeitgeist is turning, or EHRs are sliding down the Gartner hype curve….This Government Health IT article quotes managing partner Doug Brown of the Black Book Rankings research organization as stating “meaningful use incentives created an artificial market for dozens of immature EHR products” and that 31% of 17,000 EHR users surveyed would consider switching. (The actual number of practice EHRs is hundreds–respected consultants in the field have estimated about 600, and the rate of switching 50%. Adding to the problem is that many of these EHRs are offshoots of offshore IT companies, which makes customer service spotty at best. Ratings and certifications? Near meaningless.) Federal standards for ‘Meaningful Use’ fade into the distance as interoperability doesn’t seem to be baked into the EHR business model–not with hundreds of practice EHRs fighting for miniscule share. Also HealthcareITNews.
Related articles: Confusion, consolidation and collapse, More EHR misery: EHR payment cutoff, data breach, Revealed: Hospital EHRs lobbied for stimulus funding
But no worries, at one point the mining of data–the analysis of ‘big data’ generated on patients–will come from those same EHRs. Privacy concerns of course but this data can be invaluable for research: quick clinical feedback, comparative effectiveness, clinical trials, epidemiology, social acceptance of medication and similar. John Sharp in iHealthBeat reviews Electronic Health Record Data Mining — Is It a Dirty Word?
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