Like a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota so many years ago, the face of healthcare information technology in the United States is on the precipice of about a $20 billion dollar facelift that will forever change the face of EHR (electronic health record). As has been well publicized, “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” that was signed into law by President Obama in February of 2009 has allocated approximately $20 billion for “meaningful use” of a “certified EHR” in the form of increased Medicare and Medicaid payments.
What does this mean for eligible physicians? It means potentially a provision of approximately $40,000 in incentives to be paid out beginning in 2011 over a five year period. However, perhaps much less publicized, but nonetheless there are the penalties that could be imposed beginning in 2015 for those not showing “meaningful use” of a “certified EHR.”
What does all this mean for those involved in sculpting these EHR solutions? Well, there are many companies out there chiseling out their solutions for customers. These companies are all sketching out their visions of what “meaningful use” means for their customers, with the help of the Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and how to become a “certified EHR”. Some companies are taking the entire mountain as their canvas to work with in sculpting out their complete EHR solutions. Others are simply examining all the various facets which compose a complete EHR, and sculpting out the parts they have familiarity and expertise with, hoping to add it to a complete EHR vision. One small facet, to be considered in all of the potential solutions, is that the physician must demonstrate that the “certified EHR” technology is connected in a manner that provides for the electronic exchange of health information to improve the quality of health care, such as promoting care coordination. A complete and accurate EHR on a patient will be built over time from various sources of information contributing data. One could even argue that a solid EHR can be built from good EMRs being provided and built upon. It is similar to the old computer information saying, “garbage in, garbage out.” Therefore, we in the information technology arena, no matter how lightly we may touch data that may eventually flow into an EHR, have a responsibility to make that data as reliable and accurate as possible.
Although, no matter how beautiful the sculpture may be, to last the test of time, it must be made of something solid. Sand sculptures can be beautiful to look at, but we all know their beauty can be fleeting because the first high wind or crashing wave that comes along, that beauty will be gone forever. To last, the sculpture must be hard as granite, to have any hope of lasting throughout time. In looking at EHRs, one must examine what these systems are constructed from – data. Preferably, you do not want the data your EHR is built upon to be made of sand, but rather as solid as granite. So, at their foundations, an EHR is only as solid, reliable and informative as the data it is built upon. If it were your EHR, you would want it as complete and accurate as possible, so that decisions being made regarding you or your family’s health had all the facts. As we all know, we live in an age of technology where the pen and paper is quickly disappearing into the email or text.
This is why, as we have approached our ancillary healthcare solutions at Engage, such as CliniCARE™ and ClientCare™, we looked at Microsoft CRM for our solution to our customer needs, because we found entering and storing data on patients was much more than just data from fields on a form. It was all the emails, phone calls and tasks that all needed to be stored with the records on the patient from all the various correspondence that had occurred. Microsoft CRM offered us, as well as our customers, a very versatile and solid development platform to rapidly development software solutions for our customers to reliably store each and each piece of data on a patient, no matter where it originated from. This allows us to ensure to our customers, that at least for our piece of the EHR sculpture, we are providing access to a complete and accurate picture of the patient’s data.
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