Getting Your EHR and Eating It Too

For year’s EHR vendors created EHR shells with  functionality that lacked all of the creamy goodness of evidence based medicine.  Instead they have left it up to the hospitals to do this.

This has not worked well. Who wants to buy the cream puff shells at the bakery then go home to make your filling? I just want a damn cream puff. Adding the evidence-based medicine to an EHR is an amazing amount of work that literally takes a decade before the average health care organization can scratch the surface.

I read this blog post today that describes Cerner’s plans to use British Medical Journal (BMJ) clinical content: http://bit.ly/9vJEfb. Dale Sanders, CIO, Cayman Island Health Authority has written an excellent post with exuberance.

This seems to be much more connected and thought out than the pseudo-partnerships we see today between EHR vendor’s and tools such as Zynx.

This is the kind of thing that can be disruptive to the EHR market. That is, it could knock Epic off the top of the mountain.

Home Phone Challenges in Patient Registration

I was speaking to some of the folks that head up admissions and registration at Affinity Health System this week. They shared with me that recently it has become very common for patients to have to look up their home phone numbers when registering. Usually they look it up on their cell phones.

I can think of a couple of times recently when I could not rattle off my home phone number like I had my entire life. I am glad to hear that this is the result of the shift in reliance to mobile phones, rather than my approach to age 50 (at least that is my claim).

In the future we will all be like Einstein.