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Thursday, July 20, 2006Interestingly, the list of CCHIT approved software tilts heavily toward the very expensive. Which brings up the matter of cost and who will pay: In response to a question from the audience on the cost of certification to vendors, and ultimately to physicians and then consumers, HHS' Leavitt said, "The incremental increase in cost for a physician to have a certified system will be very small, but the incremental value it creates for patients and for medicine and health care in general cannot be measured." Leavitt also acknowledged that the people who are expected to make the investment in EHRs -- physicians -- may not reap the financial benefit. "That dilemma is one we're having to deal with as a country," he said. "I feel confident that in time there will be ways in which society in general, and the government specifically, will find ways to help physicians adopt health IT." Translation: "The cost will fall on the doctors and we don't care." The HHS is bent on adopting "pay for performance" as the model for Medicare reimbursement. To do that, they need doctors to have EMR's that can be easily mined for data by Medicare. How will they achieve that goal? By requiring doctors to have government-certified electronic medical records. (And people think that tracing phone calls is data mining. They haven't seen anything yet.) They haven't taken that step yet, but it will be next. As sure as summer follows spring. posted by Sydney on 7/20/2006 09:26:00 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:My first clinicals were done at a small town hospital that had gone electronic. It was very user friendly and the entire chart and up to the minute labs were right at your fingertips. The real "issue" (the only one the nurses really complained about) was the requirement that the nurses choose and enter NANDAs, NICs and NOCs. (something that hadn't been done since nursing school for many of the nurses)Obviously this data would be used for cost tracking eventually, which made many of the docs ans nurses nervous for some reason.
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Absolutely! And that's what's happening in the UK
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