Hospitals Need to Pressure Their EHR Vendors to Improve Software Functionality

I have mentioned on a number of occasions that part of the reason for the lack of interoperability of EHRs is that hospital executives are not always enthusiastic about making medical records more portable (see, for example:NYT Op-Ed on EHR Interoperability Blames Vendors and Greedy Hospitals). The fact remains, however, that EHR vendors like Epic exercise a high degree ofclient control over hospital executives, a business model that was earlier practiced by Meditech. Now comes an article quoting a hospital executive that hospitals need to turn up the heat on vendors in order to improve the functionality of their EHRs (see:Hospitals, turn up the heat on vendors if you want EHRs to improve). Below is an excerpt from the article:The time has come for hospital IT executives to become much more demanding customers of their electronic health records vendors to bolster clinical decision support, reduce medical errors and ultimately improve patient safety. “It’s up to us to demand that EMR vendors provide us with good decision support,” Mount Sinai President and COODavid Reich said at...[a recent conference].“Interacting with Epic or other EMR vendors presents certain challenges because they tend to want things in their domain, so we have to innovate outside their domain...." Reich added that hospitals also need to help EHR vendors develop the technologies and tools they need.Mount Sinai, for instance, has a number of projects underway to advance clinical de...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Electronic Health Record (EHR) Healthcare Business Healthcare Information Technology Hospital Executive Management Quality of Care Source Type: blogs