Top News
The Department of Defense opens bidding to replace all of its EHR systems, saying the new system will use off-the shelf technologies running on ONC-approved standards. The VA solicited bids Tuesday for the next step in its replacement of VistA. Evidence is scant that the two groups plan to work together to implement a single EHR systems as mandated by the President and Congress, with their only obvious common ground being a willingness to separately enrich the usual government contractors with massive taxpayer dollars.
Reader Comments
From Silversand: “Re: MU Stage 2 CQM measures. In meeting with our vendor, we were told they can’t submit them electronically yet because the standards changed in December and their software hasn’t been updated. I can’t find anything on a standards change. Is this true? Are other vendors running into the same issue? I would love to know what your readers think.” So would I (cue readers to chime in.)
From Ockham: “Re: vendor market share. KLAS estimates by bed size, i.e. ‘Meditech has 18 percent of hospitals over 200 beds.’ This is meaningless. It should be expressed as the number of beds in all hospitals using a system, which would be easy to calculate using information from HIMSS Analytics. Having a lot of beds means having a lot of clinician users, which pushes product development. Epic blasted into a leadership position is because having 400 hospitals that are large and larger trumps having 2,000 hospitals that are small (Meditech).” That’s true, as long as your product is suitable for large hospitals and you have the competence to sell it to them. Epic’s timing was perfect because soon those big, Epic-using hospitals will have bought all the smaller ones and replaced their incumbent systems, putting Epic in hospitals that couldn’t have afforded or supported it on their own. It’s like the political system – you’ll see all kinds of parties on the ballot, but only two of them get a significant number of votes.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
A few HIStalk Practice highlights from the last week include: physicians prefer smartphones to tablets to perform most professional tasks. Practice Fusion offers free Google Chromebooks to new users. CMS reminds EPs of pending deadline to attest to MU for the 2013 Medicare EHR incentive program. In part three of our series, HIT vendor execs share details about technologies on their company’s roadmap for the next 12-18 months. Thanks for reading.
Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Optimum Healthcare IT. The Jacksonville Beach, FL-based full-service consulting firm provides expert consultants at competitive rates. Services include EHR deployment (all major vendors); integration services (interface development and integration engines); staff augmentation (program directors, …read more
