Is Technology Helping or Hurting Your Healthcare Practice?

There’s no telling how medical technology will change in the future, but those with stock in the delivery of healthcare can shape its utilization in a way that doesn’t negatively affect patient care. As long as there is value in human relationships and healing touch, technology can facilitate the delivery of care rather than impede it.

Why Is EHR Interoperability So Difficult?

The point of the blame game isn’t to persecute the players, but to understand the dynamics of interoperability issues, in order to create solutions. Of the stakeholders, only policymakers have a clear, strong interest in promoting interoperability. They should ensure that cross-vendor interoperability isn’t prohibitively costly for EHR vendors and providers. Once the business case for interoperability outweighs the business case against it, both vendors and providers can pursue it without great harm to their bottom lines.

Why Physicians Must Engage with Technology

How would anyone feel if half of everything they learned turned out to be wrong? Early in my medical career, a mentor relayed a similar age-old sentiment. “One-half of everything you learn in medical school will turn out to be […]

Electronic Health Records: The Scourge

The consensus among users is that what is needed most in EHRs is interoperability. The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) has defined interoperability as “the ability of different information technology systems and software applications to communicate, exchange data, and use the information that has been exchanged.” Interoperability opens the way for many new digital tools — such as apps for both physicians and patients — to make data-sharing among EHRs a priceless asset, not a source of frustration.

We need access to patient records in EHRs from different systems. This type of communication was one of the fundamental lacks that the transition from paper was meant to remedy. The issue, unfortunately, is commercially driven lack of cooperation, not lack of technology….