When sponsored CDS is a crime …

Today, The Department of Justice issued an announcement that was “the first ever criminal action against an EHR vendor.” Criminal action The core of the criminal action was something inevitable:  the tension between better health and better profit.  Here’s what I saw … all of which caused me to be not-so-surprised today when the news broke. In 2008 I was the CMIO at Allscripts.  Much of my work was focused on how our customers could use our products to improve the health of our patients.  We implemented clinical practice guidelines in the software as a way to help clinical teams and patients make well-informed decisions that would improve their health. The company was doing well, but there was always pressure to find more revenue. We had a small team that worked closely with pharmaceutical companies and generated revenue from these relationships.  I wasn’t very involved with this team, but due to my ownership of many of the clinical decision support initiatives, I started getting invited to meetings we had with pharmaceutical companies.  The first was an initiative that involved a company selling a statin drug.  They wanted to sponsor a program in which we would use a clinical decision support notification to alert clinicians to patients who might be candidates for statin therapy but had not yet been offered a statin drug.  On its face, this seemed appropriate: it invoked evidence based clinical guidance, the decision support didn’t...
Source: Docnotes - Category: Primary Care Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs