A feature of every EMR vendor is a whole multitude of sales lines. If you’ve ever talked to a EMR sales person, you know what I’m talking about. This isn’t really unique to EMR sales. The same can be said of most software that’s trying to solve complex problems.

Well, there’s one EMR vendor sales line that gets on my nerves more than any other line. Let’s take a demo of an EMR vendor’s templates. Now here’s the line that I absolutely abhor:

“You can make it do whatever you want.”

Hearing this is like hearing fingernails on a chalkboard for me. Certainly, the intent of their comment is that the EMR template creation is really flexible (and it very well might be). However, the superlative “whatever” is just wrong. Every software system has limitations and I can guarantee you that if you really start using an EMR system you’re going to bump into those limitations.

I guess my problem is using superlatives like whatever, any, all, always, etc. is just misleading and leads to what I call EMR sales miscommunication. Anytime you hear one of those things during an EMR demo (or even during an EMR training) you better start asking lots of questions.

Of course, these superlatives do a lot better job selling EMR software. I guess that’s why I’ll never be an EMR salesperson. Maybe it’s also why people seem to like reading my EMR blog posts.

A little while back, the Health Care blog has a pretty interesting post talking about how to define the term EHR. Normally, this debate would just be an academic debate which in the end nobody would really care about. You may remember my rant about EMR versus EHR which was really just me complaining the Google didn’t recognize both terms and send more traffic to my website (just being honest) along with me feeling like there’s little practical difference in the terms EMR and EHR(despite others disagreement).

Instead of EHR being basically a marketing tool for EMR vendors, the HITECH act’s use of the word “certified EHR” has made the meaning of this term rather important. Well, at least it’s important if you care about the $18 billion that they plan on spending on EHR software.

The above linked article suggested that ONCHIT should adopt the term “EHR technology” to replace the terms EMR and EHR. They suggested that the term would be defined as “An information technology tool, such as a software program or application, that is used to create, consume, manage or transport health data in electronic or digital form.”

This discussion reminds me of my previous post Hospital CIO’s take on CCHIT. In it, this hospital CIO suggests that a problem with CCHIT certification is that it assumes that only one program would provide all the needed EHR functionality. However, maybe the best implementation is a group of programs that are more effective than an individual EHR could accomplish.

What is becoming more clear to me is that the government really needs to start focusing on the results it wants to achieve as opposed to trying to prescribe what IT implementation will best achieve those results. Let’s leave the academics of defining EHR to the academics.