EHR is the Fossil Fuel of Healthcare

Healthcare has become completely dependent on EHR. There’s no getting around it. In every organization that has an EHR, it’s the center of pretty much every healthcare providers work day. We’ve seen all the studies that talk about how much time doctors spend on the EHR. The problem I have with those studies is they never compare how much time doctors spent doing paper charts to the time they’re now spending on the EHR. However, these studies do also illustrate how integral the EHR has become in healthcare. Expanding beyond the time spent on an EHR, could a hospital or medical practice get paid without an EHR today? I guess some medical practices still do, but if the EHR were to shut down healthcare organizations would largely stop being able to bill for the services they offer. Healthcare billing is completely dependent on the EHR. Looking at this in a more positive light, EHR data is also the fuel of so many other exciting healthcare IT initiatives. Clinical decision support is all largely built into the EHR and on the back of EHR data. Much of the personalized medicine that is happening (except genomic medicine) is happening with EHR data. The same goes for population health analysis and all the healthcare analytics that are looking at ways to improve care and lower costs. Is there any department in healthcare that doesn’t have a dependency on the EHR? I guess the cleaning staff don’t. However, that illustrates how dependent we are on EH...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: EHR Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR EHR Dependency Source Type: blogs