Disruptive Regulation

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE The latest salvo in the interoperability and information-blocking debate comes from two academic experts in the field of informatics, and was recently published in JAMIA. In the brief article, Sittig and Wright are endeavoring to describe the prerequisites for classifying an EHR as “open” or interoperable. I believe the term “open” is a much better fit here, and if the EHR software happens to come from a business dependent on revenues, as opposed to grant funding from the government, bankrupt may be a more accurate description. Since innovation in the EHR market seems to lack any disruptive effects, perhaps a bit of disruptive regulation would help push everything over the edge. Although the article seems to be just another shot at Epic, the currently #1 EHR in the country, which is privately owned and run by a woman (a seemingly irritating anomaly in the EHR world), it does have some interesting points worth exploring. The authors propose five overlapping use cases to describe functionality that is important to five stakeholder groups: clinicians, researchers, administrators, software developers and lastly, patients. Let’s look at each one in more detail (pay attention, since we’ll have a quiz at the end), and keep in mind that these requirements are meant to be enforced on all EHRs, including the relatively cheap little one you have in your office.   Use case 1: Extract The first use case states that a client facility should be able t...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs