Thursday, June 14, 2012

Escaping the EHR Trap — The Future of Health IT

From the article: "It is a widely accepted myth that medicine
requires complex, highly specialized information-technology (IT) systems. This
myth continues to justify soaring IT costs, burdensome physician workloads, and
stagnation in innovation — while doctors become increasingly bound to
documentation and communication products that are functionally decades behind
those they use in their “civilian” life…. We believe that EHR vendors propagate
the myth that health IT is qualitatively different from industrial and consumer
products in order to protect their prices and market share and block new
entrants. In reality, diverse functionality needn't reside within single EHR
systems, and there's a clear path toward better, safer, cheaper, and nimbler
tools for managing health care's complex tasks." Read more