I love taking email exchanges I have with practicing doctors and making their comments into posts. This is one of those cases. The following is a quote from an email I got from a physician friend of mine about his EHR (EHR name removed):
Every time we turn around these days our EHR vendor is adding some new update. Sometimes the updates change the format of how the system appears and functions, sometimes they don’t. Unfortunately, the people who are still chasing after all the crazy government hoops to jump through and those who are not are all forced to deal with the same EHR software system. I really wish there was a separate system with no crazy upgrades that would function the same way that the system did two years ago. That was a much simpler and more commonsensical system. It’s a really sad case of the government says jump and software systems say how high?
I believe this physician has stopped taking Medicare patients and has happily avoided meaningful use. However, as the above comments illustrate, he hasn’t avoided a lot of the impact that meaningful use has had on the design of his EHR system. Plus, that doesn’t even count all the great new features that this doctor could have gotten from his EHR if they weren’t busy turning on all the MU requirements including the MU reporting and tracking.
His comments about wanting a system that isn’t influenced by MU requirements is quite interesting since Pri-Med (the company that acquired Amazing Charts) has announced an EHR product called InLight EHR that’s not certified and doesn’t do MU. The press release says the EHR is designed for Direct Primary Care. This is a really interesting move by them, and my doctor friend above illustrates why an EHR software that’s not MU certified could work.
One challenge to this idea is that a lot of doctors can’t shun Medicare and meaningful use. So, they’ll need to continue with the EHR that are still chasing the government carrot and avoiding the stick. We’ll see how these different EHR markets evolve.
Source:: http://www.emrandhipaa.com/emr-and-hipaa/2015/02/04/an-ehr-focused-on-customer-requests-not-mu/
